Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.
Some other communities to consider before posting:
5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.
7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
.
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, despite being an IT guy, I've never been great at the mechanics of "how the fuck the computer does its magic" which is a huge part of the linux appeal for me.
Interesting notes though and absolutely worth considering, thanks!
It definitely teaches you a lot, even if you don't go and start tweaking source code.
Also OpenSUSE tumbleweed and some other distros have btrfs with built in snapshotting. So if you wreck your install, you just reboot and choose an older (working) snapshot. Them set that as your default to boot from. No downtime from mistakes is nice.
Ha, yeah I've seen a lot of advice about snapshotting the install in case I accidentally destroy it. Love the notion of having that automated! There's a whole world of linux awesomeness that I'm looking forward to. (Until I try abd am reduced to tears but until then...!)
Somethings have truly been amazing like plugging in a random device and it just works without having to install drivers.
Or my obscure Ethernet only printer that had some interface to add it as an IP network printer via windows custom port that always failed to connect on Windows; on Linux (specifically openSUSE YAST printer discovery) finds my printer, suggests a model number, then gives me a list of gutenprint drivers that support it. I select the driver, it works. No stupid Canon network app that windows couldn't work with. It also adds it as a CUPS shared printer and everyone can print to it like magic.
But, then on a negative note, there was last week: the ooensource NVIDIA driver fell behind the Kernel release I'm on. So it meant booting to the advanced menu and choosing an older kernel at boottime. After a few times of that I was irritated so just uninstalled all nvidia drivers, added the proprietary repo and installed the nVidia drivers directly from Nvidia. It works now. And with switcheroo package I can right click apos and launch on the integrated GPU or the Dedicated GPU. A problem you'd probably not see too often on Windows
We have something similar on Nixos too - every time you change your system (install an app, change the wallpaper, add a network drive, or whatever) it makes a new "generation", and every time you boot you get to choose which one to boot. It's definitely more work than other distros though, so I wouldn't recommend it for you probably.
For the comment about Desktop Environment, you have a lot of options and for new penguins, that choice probably matters more than the actual distribution.
The two biggest are KDE and Gnome. Both come with a ton of applications (like calculator, image viewer, file browser, maybe a browser and email client. Can be all sorts of stuff). KDE looks more like Windows, Gnome looks more like MacOS, but both are pretty customizable so you can make them look more or less how you want.
Oh interesting, I'd figured I'd just stick with the default environment but I suppose I could absolutely look around for ones that play nicely with some beginners distro like Mint.
Thanks!
When I installed Debian froma USB drive, it gave me the choice of, I think, six desktop environments! Not all distributions give you a choice on install, and most will let you switch without too much trouble. I'm sure there are some that are biuilt around a particular DE, though.
A Live USB with Debian on it should have several options, and I think you can pick all of them. When you have multiple installed, it lets you switch on the login screen.
Looks like your choices on a Debian live installer will be:
[ ] GNOME [ ] Xfce [ ] KDE Plasma [ ] Cinnamon [ ] MATE [ ] LXDE [ ] LXQt