1000% agree. Had to install an older version of Pinta because it was also gnomed a while back.
While I’ve yet to contribute to open-source projects aside from reporting issues, I’ve got my eyes set on something like libadapta. As soon as one of the programs I use on a daily basis gets gnomed, I’m going all in to soft fork libadwaita and restore as many GTK3 features as I can.
rm -rf /usr/share/icons/Adwaita
I practically never need to. I’ll find a way to make things work one way or another.
Depends on the degree of coreboot support. If the vendor or a firm like 3mdeb officially supports coreboot on your model of choice, it’ll have first-class support and you won’t miss out on anything compared to your typical proprietary BIOS.
If you plan on installing it yourself, do read carefully through the coreboot docs since some systems will have a few quirks (e.g. audio jack issues on T480/T470). But once coreboot is up and running on your computer, it’s smooth sailing on Linux. Compiling and flashing can be a bit of a rabbit hole, but I’m happy to give some pointers if you go this route.
I daily drive a ThinkPad X230 with Libreboot and haven’t had any issues. The only significant differences I’ve noticed are
nvramcui payload) has very few optionsLost my mind a few years ago over this quirk. Now I always change both files when I want to change the hostname.
I’ve been daily driving Debian Stable for the past 5 years and I am more than happy to continue for the next five. It’s also on nearly all of my machines and the majority of my VMs.
I’m honestly not very keen on the latest features or hardware, but I am very keen on my software being predictable and consistent, so the Debian release cycle is perfect for me.
Fellow Debian user ricing my daily driver here. Other people may call me crazy too, but I can see where you’re coming from. I’ve mostly come to terms with it by reminding myself that most people are either blissfully ignorant or too busy to care.
Have you considered making a sort of install script or even just a public repository for your tweaks? Makes it all a bit more accessible for those interested to adopt elements of your system. I’ve personally wanted to put together an automated install script once I perfect my Chicago95 rice since I’d imagine there’s quite a few people who want a one-click, retro, but functional system.
Got Debian with MATE on a couple of my computers. It’s easy on the eyes and easy on system resources. I like that its file manager lets you expand folders so I have that installed on my XFCE machines too.
I will admit, I miss the smooth graphics of Virtualbox. It’s quite evident with dragging windows around or playing a video inside a VM. Don’t want to touch Oracle stuff anymore though. Anyone here manage to get that working on virt-manager?
Functionally, not really. I can get my work done on anything from FVWM to GNOME without a hitch.
Aesthetically, very much. The Chicago95 theme sparks joy and makes work just a bit more enjoyable. KDE and GNOME might have more creature comforts, but I will happily tolerate XFCE because it works well with Chicago95. I don’t even do fresh installs anymore because of the time it takes for me to configure the visual style just right. I’ll instead image from an install I’ve prepared on a VM.
Between 2 and 3. I’ll show off my Linux setup to friends and preach to the choir, but I won’t rub my choices in the faces of people who use other distros or operating systems.
Certainly. I’ve had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE’s xfce4-terminal, MATE’s Caja file browser, and GNOME’s Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won’t get in the way either.
Display manager won’t matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.
The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.
Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you’re interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.
No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won’t prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.
Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you’re using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn’t automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.
Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I’m not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.
Because hamburger menus do not belong on any screen larger than a tablet
It isn’t a dedicated font viewer, but I’ve used ImageMagick’s display utility to preview fonts.
Linux Mint is your best bet. Intuitive for new users without any flashy features to get in the way.
All said, temper your expectations. I did this for a couple of my folks and the Linux partition just sat untouched until I next visited (and presumably thereafter). Despite updates for their existing Windows 10 ending. For an unfortunate majority of people, they don’t really care until their browser stops rendering pages, no matter how you proselytize Linux.
No personal experience on how to make the dual-boot graphical, but that’s a very good idea. I’ve witnessed computer science graduates struggle to get their computer to boot from a USB stick.
Separate disk because that eliminates interference with the Windows Boot Manager. More like the other way around since Windows tends to mess with GRUB after certain updates if it’s on the same disk. Nearly every concern with whether to install Windows or Linux first arises from trying to dual-boot on the same disk. And if anything goes wrong, you can just revert by unplugging the Linux disk instead of painstakingly reconstructing a broken Windows install.
If you are passionate enough and have some money to spare, get a used laptop (240 GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 3rd Gen i5 at a minimum), preferably enterprise-grade (Latitude, ProBook, ThinkPad), clean it up, and pop Linux Mint onto it. Your folks can then experience Linux at their leisure, side-by-side with their existing machine at no risk. No fussing with boot order menus, which I have seen confuse computer science graduates.
RX 480, thinking of upgrading since ROCm support for it ended a while ago and working around it has become very painful
Reinstalling GRUB in chroot so it ‘registers’ with the BIOS when cloning an install of Linux
Same, too many clocks, all getting out of sync, and some on power strips that get turned off periodically.
I was thinking something on those lines the other day. We like to say that Linux revives old computers, and I wouldn’t for a second consider putting Windows back on them, but I also have a case of hardware support so close, yet so far. I’ve two old laptops with nvidia chips from before the days of Optimus switiching, so you are forced to use the dGPU. Believe me, I wasted a whole weekend trying to make them use only integrated graphics. It was fine while they were supported under the proprietary nvidia driver, but as soon as support ended, nouveau became the only option and it absolutely crippled 3D performance, even on very old titles. Meanwhile, Windows still supports the old 340 driver needed for those graphics chips.
Mostly comes down to hardware vendors not bothering with Linux support and open-source in general. Which leaves support for affected devices down to volunteers having time to reverse-engineer a driver from scratch. To be clear, I don’t blame nouveau at all. It must have been a ton of work to even get the nouveau driver to its current state.
Surprisingly good in most cases. Main thing missing for me is support for programs directly talking to USB devices (understandably, the associated driver support is its own can of worms).