Took my first steps last night, I flashed a USB stick with Mint Cinnamon and gave it a spin. Looks like it'll handle everything I need to just fine, so imma start partitioning and backing up the next couple evenings and just go for it. I've installed Linux before, but only really as temporary solutions. I'm looking forward to making it my daily driver and learning the system.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Took my first steps last night, I flashed a USB stick with Mint Cinnamon and gave it a spin.
Happily using Mint myself, welcome onboard ;)
Welcome aboard! Linux Mint was the first distro I daily drove, so it still has a special place in my heart even though I haven't used it in years. One quick tip, check out SaveDesktop It's not a proper backup utility, but it makes it very quick and easy to restore all your apps, settings, and layouts if something ever breaks / you switch distros / you want to experiment with multiple desktop layouts.
I upvote for a non-AI thumbnail.
God I am tired of them!
OpenSUSE is hardly what I would consider noob friendly, but it certainly beats remaining under Microsoft's oppressing thumb.
I mean YaST is kind of snazzy, though not enough to pull me from Debian for the moment.
Yeah, I'm basically married to Fedora at this point.
Leap is surely noob-friendly.
how do they do regular updates? how do they do major version upgrades?
I think both of these is a big pain point.
They're fine for a stable release I think. Nvidia is on 550 for example. For Major updates, ping me next year since I'll try it then, when new Leap arrived.
I don't understand, sorry. what I meant is the way you as the user do upgrades. you grab a terminal, elevate and run the system update command (zypper refresh, zypper update). major version upgrades are more complicated.
I can do this sure. But this is not noob friendly the slightest. and the YaST graphical tools don't make it much better either.
I won't say that the update system of windows is good because why the fuck does searching for updates minutes, and other reasons. but the UI of it is much better. it tells you what will it update, it has a button for starting the process, an automatism for it too. there's also a menu for the update history.
Not sure when the last time you used openSUSE but the reason why I think it's noob-friendly is you don't need a terminal to update the system (talking about the KDE version here). When there is an update a notification pops up, you go to system tray, click on the icon and do the updates. You can even see a list what's been updating. It doesn't even ask a password, probably thanks to polkit.
leap 15.4, with KDE.
When there is an update a notification pops up, you go to system tray, click on the icon and do the updates.
you mean the menu that will make your system unstable if you dont reboot immediately after updates?
if I can remember, it also does not do it automatically, by which I mean there is no setting to make it automatic.
to try to make it better I had to install a separate package, of which I have not found any information on suse documentation, to have the KDE built-in automatic update system.
and it does not work.
it restarts the system twice, after which zypper still says that all the updates need to be installed.
you mean the menu that will make your system unstable if you dont reboot immediately after updates?
Not sure what that is or what menu it is. But yeah, the updates are not automatic, you have to manually start it. That "must restart after the update" thing is related to systemd, not openSUSE.
If someone wants an auto update system, that can be arranged with scripts. No idea where that could be done via GUI though. Sorry, I cannot check it right away since it's not my system. I don't use openSUSE or KDE myself.
Not sure what that is or what menu it is. But yeah, the updates are not automatic, you have to manually start it. That "must restart after the update" thing is related to systemd, not openSUSE.
I don't think it's systemd's fault that I repeatedly experienced general system unstability after installing updates with zypper.
By this I mean several elements of the system becoming unresponsive, like the shutdown, reboot, log out buttons stopping from working (them being pressed only resulting in a syslog error about being unable to start the program that shows the countdown), but also other programs like firefox acting weiry.
I don't think it's the fault of opensuse specifically.
And if you think about it, it's logical that this would happen.
Because version A of programs is what is still running, but the filesystem now has version B of a lot of things including executables and libraries, with lots of changes, and the assumptions for which version A programs were coded do not hold up anymore. And they crash, not even start, or do bad things. Processes that make use of D-Bus are especially sensisensitive to this, but others like firefox sometimes get tangled into it when they load a library only after the files were updated (yes I've experienced that too, both on linux and windows).
It's no wonder windows installers always ask you to close all (related) programs before installing or updating. It's not unique to windows: android kills the app when it is updated, abd system updates require a restart as well. I don't know what does flatpak do, but I'm sure that after updating the package, only after restarting its app will the changes get applied.
Not completely but kind of, all those poweroff, reboot etc. tied to systemd, though I believe this is mostly related to polkit run out of time. Can be fixed with a longer timeout. This also happens to me on Arch and yeah it's kinda annoying.
Normally updates don't change a thing on Linux since the system runs on RAM. However, with these systemd updates, things have changed. Without systemd, it's still the same more or less.
Not completely but kind of, all those poweroff, reboot etc. tied to systemd, though I believe this is mostly related to polkit run out of time.
that's right, but as I remember the error was talking about being unable to launch that KDE-specufic countdown overlay. journalctl has shown such an error for every time I tried to stop the session in any of the ways.
Normally updates don't change a thing on Linux since the system runs on RAM.
that's not how I understand the system is working. could you elaborate?
Oh, I meant a running system. Usually you would only need to reboot if you want to use the new kernel right away after an update. For most of the programs, you don't even need to restart them if they're already running. However, if you restart them they will run as the newer updated version.
Could that be my issue? I've always done Gnome. WiFi is always broken. Network in general really.
To be fair, that sounds like a driver issue rather than a desktop environment. But you can try though.
Could be. What blows my mind is that both my PC and laptop work on Fedora, PopOS, Endeavour, and Bazzite out of the box, but network is fully broken, LAN and WiFi.
Does network work on those distros but not on openSUSE, or network doesn't work at all?
Maybe it's a switch issue? Can you try sudo rfkill and see what's the output?
They work on any other distro I've tried. OpenSUSE is the only one that never gets an address. Static or DHCP, doesn't make a difference. I'll try again with your suggestion from a USB drive, since I don't remember all the things I tried that did nothing to help. Thanks.
No problem.
Hmm, if there was a soft-block or a hard-block that would affect all the other distros as well. In that case, trying from a Live ISO would indeed help. Maybe this could be something related to Network Manager. Can you check interfaces with ip a?
Also check if Network Manager running with systemctl status NetworkManager. If it doesn't work, start it with sudo systemctl start NetworkManager, then chekc your connection again.
opensuse was my shortest experiment when i used to distro hop because of how old their software seemed to be. (ie old like debian stable).
this was almost 20 years; has it gotten better?
My first experiment with openSUSE was also not ended well back then but nowadays it's in my top 3 list when I'm suggesting distros to people.
... nowadays it’s in my top 3 list when I’m suggesting distros to people
same here; but only because of the support like red hat's and canonical's
I've tried it a few times over the years, but always find it clunky when coming from Fedora, so I end up jumping right back. It's also a real shitshow with my System 76 laptop WiFi, just doesn't play nice and takes to much work to make it functional.
i take back what i said; i just discovered that suse isn't going to support opensuse anymore.
I tried to find sources on that but failed. Could you help me out?
i was wrong. i misread the article thinking that opensuse was going to turn into an analogue similar to centos stream ending up with suse eventually sun setting opensuse like red hat is doing with centos; but no, they're ARE doing a centos stream like model but it's going to be back and forth between opensuse leap and opensuse tumbleweed.
opensuse is back on the recommended list. lol
Thank you for the clarification 😊!
I use it at home just because I wanted to try something different on my laptop, I really don’t understand what some people love about it so much. It’s bot terrible or anything, I just find it a bit clunky and there’s nothing remarkably good.
The big thing it has going for it is that they set up btrfs snapshots out of the box so you can rollback if necessary.
They also do more automated testing than Arch so theoretically it should be more stable.
Longtime every OS user. But have been using Linux since the days of Mandrake in ‘96. Switched to Debian shortly thereafter though mostly as a server/SDN device. Then a long spell on Ubuntu starting with 8.something. While I don’t use Linux on the desktop as my primary work OS, I do use it daily.
Recently, annoyed with windows, which I only used/booted up for gaming, I gave gaming on Linux a try. It’s been mostly flawless even when the games aren’t Linux-native. Hilariously Ubuntu was awful and I couldn’t get it working so I’ve switched to something more gaming specific and couldn't happier.
What are you using now? I've been thinking of switching to popos but I'm keeping my eyes open for options.
Garuda.
I’d never used Arch or Arch derivatives but if this is the experience I understand the memes a little more.
The package management is easy and very up to date. I like the BTRFS snapshots, and it had everything game-related available right out of the box. My Nvidia graphics card, which was the thing I couldn’t get working on Ubuntu, performed as well or better than under windows.
The only thing that didn’t work for me was ZFS - but because everything else was working well, I just went another route.
Even it's not windows 10 eol, having windows 10 feels useless.
Why did we all collectively choose mint?
its easy, less gross than ubuntu/canonical, if mint specific instructions aren't available for something then ubuntu or debian instructions will generally work without much adaptation if any, etc.
I dont need my OS to be a challenge or a flex.
Because common advice isbto use Mint for beginners.
It’s polished and easy to use, it leverages all the work that goes into Debian and Ubuntu, but it’s still Linux under the hood and doesn’t forbid you from getting into the weeds.
I run Mint Cinnamon on my work machine, developing software for embedded Linux products, and I haven’t had any regrets.
I need to do this with my gaming computer yet. I run Linux on my other machines (and have for many years), but this one is Windows. I bought the computer in 2021, but it doesn't have the trusted computing module, so I can't upgrade it to Windows 11 even if I wanted to.
Last night I tried to add an SSD that I had from a laptop that died, figuring I'll put a fresh install of Linux on the second SSD and not touch the original drive. Unfortunately, the computer didn't want to boot off the original drive any more - even when I changed the boot priority to the original drive, I still got grub from the new drive. I had to disconnect the new SSD to get the computer to boot Windows on the original drive (I wasn't ready to do the Linux install and might need Windows in the mean time).
I know it's a temporary issue at worst, as the installer will likely pick up that Windows installation and make it an option in grub. But it was a setback I wasn't expecting. I figured I'd put in the drive and have it just idling there until I had time to run the Linux installation.