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Distro hoping is fine. But there is a certain feeling you get when you can fix your own problems by reading the arch wiki
How to enter arch wiki if no internet
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
Your optimism about sock cleanliness is wonderful
Phone or use an offline copy
Going to save this link just in case the Internet goes down one day.
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.
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.)
I’ve never tried that. I do the wifi hotspot but what do I need to do USB tether?
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 😇
Just download it and setup on your own server
I am a nerd with many computers. That helps.
you can download the arch wiki on kiwix (for android), it’s like 30 megabytes
I use the Arch wiki for non arch stuff
That and the man pages
You ever read the man pages for mount?
The ones for goo are especially satisfying.
Should i?
man mountY’all are using Linux for that?
You guys read man pages?
Distro hoping is fine.
Yeah. I hope my distro keeps working as smooth as always. I really hope.
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: 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.
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.
me: hey mint, suspend automatically.
mint: no.
me: suspend manually then.
mint: no.
me: shutdown
mint: no.
…
sudo shutdown nowI find that to be the most convenient and also the quickest way.
sudo shutdown now
No.
For your case…
Alt + SysRq + O
My cat’s favorite key combo
Mint: It’s already set up
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.
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.
Mint has a GUI menu where you can select a newer kernel.
Thankfully Ubuntu will focus on shipping the newest kernel each release and Mint’s gonna profit of it. Also there’s newer kernels you can switch to optionally.
Me: Btw how old are your packages?
Mint: Its rude to ask the age of a distro
Me: well are the maintained properly?
Mint: uhhhh… Some of them are
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
That’s a big part of why I switched to OpenSuse XD
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
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!!!
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
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.
Well, I’ve only seen KDE on TW, so maybe it was just the default theme color scheme that gave me NT flashbacks. Though I did actually mean that as a compliment. Maybe I also don’t remember NT well enough.
Gnome extensions can look pretty much exactly like kde or better depending on your taste, kde is easier to customize and more intuitive. I like that gnome is extension based with each extension being something you pick, many having their own customization and settings.
Some extensions I like: Arcmenu: start menu like windows, kde, etc. lots of layout options, replaces the hot corner big icon search menu thing
Dash to dock: use on handheld, perfect touchscreen menu customizable or (use one at a time) Dash to panel: use on desktop, even more customizable, basically gives you a panel since gnome by default has the hot corner android like app menu (which I also use mostly on the handheld, love the hot corner for moving stuff around)
Windows thumbnails (pip any window, monitor downloads or chats)
I use a lot more but forget the names, nothing really breaks if you toggle use incompatible addons or whatever it’s called. You can also edit the addon and change the version since that is what the devs do 90% of the time to update it.
I really like the top bar, hot corner, workplace swapping on mouse scroll, control center, etc. Kde is a close second for me, and I may be swapping back soon just because I get bored using the same thing. Prob not if you can’t backup your layout, really like what my gnome desktop looks like and its functional/productive.
Tophat is great for quick resource monitoring. Ddterm for a dropdown terminal. Campeek to quickly check webcam. A timer for self timing some online work I do that is self reported. It’s just perfectly setup and not crowded at all while having so much. I do miss the pop out tab sticky notes on kde.
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.
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
Feren OS on a ThinkPad L390 sleeps and wakes perfectly. Probably because of thinkpad
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 desktop with arch (btw) also sleeps and wakes without issues
Same with my Arch install btw, suspend works fine. 🤷♂️
SteamOS gets it mostly right
I’ve literally never had a problem with this…that I know about.
What are you all turning off?
Ha! It’s the one issue that’s been giving me the biggest headache through multiple distros. To be fair I believe most of my problems originate from Nvidia hardware and software.
God yes, it was fucking with my partners graphics drivers, and killed most games I have running.
Wrong target, the graphics drivers are.
I’ve been having this exact same problem. I don’t have a fix, but hey, comradery.
It’s annoying, but it isn’t feeding my data into the AIs.
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.
This was my exact experience with Manjaro.
Since when does Facebook have a distro?
That’s Fedora
Since when did they change the logo from a fedora to… this bullshit?
i always think that when i see it too. I hate that the logos are so similar
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.
as a debian user, i can confirm :)
As a badminton player, we have the same length socks.
Damn, I need to buy longer socks.
You really do not. You’re all good.
unrelated, but what on green earth happened in the inbox?
They’ll never see your question
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
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)
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)
And Kinonite by extension. I updated and restarted because I like fresh kernels.
Don’t judge me, it’s my kink OK. In my sad, pathetic little white bread life in the middle of nowhere.
Fedora gnome was the definition of perfect. It was so stable that it was boring. The KDE one on the other hand…… Let’s say it has never worked for more than a day for me.
Don’t you put that evil on KDE, Ricky Bobby!!
If KDE was a woman… I’d take her out for a 3 course meal, split the bill bc she don’t need no man to take care of her (or her baby), drive her home using the scenic route, walk with her from the car to her front door, then ask for consent before giving her a goodnight kiss
Back when I last tried LM gnome, it would fail to get to the log-in screen every couple weeks. So far haven’t had any major issues with bazzite kde.
“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?
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.
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 🤔
Have 2 Monitors with different screen resolutions. It crashes more often than windows 95 when I try to alt tab between applications.
I use mint, btw
