Help me transition from Windows to Linux

Software & Operating Systems Linux
41

+1 to this. I use it on my workstation at work for PHP and other web development.

It's the simplest way to just "get working". I prefer Arch for tinkering with and my home computer.

Yeah that's one of the major issues with Linux I tend to have. Just a complete lack of support for very basic features.

I read a development log for libinput regarding mouse movement. I personally 100% prefer 1:1 movement and seek to use the DPI on my mouse itself to adjust it. Acceleration is evil and will always be evil to me because I can't "learn" non-linear movement.

The log made it seem like the developer working on it found it strange anyone would want a 1:1 mouse profile, and it took months for a "flat scaling" profile to be implemented.

Pulseaudio on both Arch and Fedora "just works" mostly, but god is it a pile of crap.

Well, support for a version of Fedora lasts for 1 year, so you don't necessarily have to upgrade every 6 months.

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I can tell you right now, all these problems you are facing are probably a "you" thing and not a "Linux" thing. I only say that because where you have issues, many others have none. And when I say "a you issue", I mean your hardware/installation method possibly.

I have 0 issues with Fedora on my workstation. It's pretty fantastic. I don't bother with Software Manager. I just use this site: http://rpmfind.net

@kuro68k

You prefer to use Chrome. You also say you are careful about your privacy. So that leads me to the question....

Have you disabled Google's Phishing and Malware Protection?

That feature can be read about here in regards to disabling it: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

To use that feature, Chrome has to send every URL access via Chrome to a Google server for checking against a database. If they're smart, they hash the URL before they get it. If they're really smart, they do that and still know what the real URL is.

Then, minimally, they have a URL and an IP Address. But they probably have lots of agent information too.

That feature is bad times for privacy.

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42

A core dev for PA has a patreon to help fund development to make PA better. I've been supporting him for about 5 months now, and every month he releases a changelog.

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43

See, that's neat. Back when I tried Ubuntu 12.04, PA was very hard for me to get working on an AMD GPU via HDMI.

I would hope his work has been what fixed it.

The thing is that the guy who made PulseAudio is one of the developers for SystemD. A lot of things he makes tend to be very.... pre-alpha even upon release.

notably the sound middleware PulseAudio (started in 2004), the networking solution Avahi (started in 2005), and since 2010 the system startup system systemd.

He works for Red Hat apparently.

Is it this guy? https://www.patreon.com/tanuk

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44

yes, thats the guy.

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45

Ubuntu seems like such a missed opportunity to me... They wasted so much time and money building their craptacular desktop, trying to turn it into a failed mobile platform.

They should have invested all that into just fixing basic stuff that people expect to work, like the mouse wheel and HDMI and 4k support and so on.

46

Thanks for clearing it up. at least for me.

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47

I wish the barrier to entry was lower. I'd love to contribute code and fix stuff like that, but it really isn't easy to get started.

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48

If the barrier to entry was lower, we'd have machines writing their own code much sooner.

mah jerbs

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49

I'm going to try Debian with KDE next. Used to running it headless, and apt seems nicer than the Fedora package manager. Plus Ubuntu means there is lots of support for doing stuff on Debian.

50

True that. Different distributions have forums but they require time and patience. You can always head there with queries and even tips but again, time.

51

Most annoying this for me with Linux is that most distros are setup VERY VERY VERY bare bones, for example OpenSuse GNOME desktop. Spent the whole day getting functionality back out of it because its been stripped so dry that you literally need to add in every bit yourself. Takes a while to find all that info and do it.

I would say KDE isn't as bad because it lets you customize things pretty good off the back. I just decided to give the GNOME desktop a go, talk about feature stripped!

With OpenSUSE you will be thrilled to find half your youtube videos won't play and twitch doesn't work, the reason is because you need to go to the forums and get the media install 1 click link.. Took me a while to realize this... I actually reinstalled because I thought I broke it LOL

52

You could give Deepin Linux a spin, it's Debian just more friendly out of the box and has a nice GUI.
https://www.deepin.org/en/

I've been meaning to give it a try myself, but I've not got around to it yet.

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53

IIRC opensuse isn't marketed as a home user distro, just some people DO use it as a home user distro because they like YAST and so on.

https://geckolinux.github.io/
this is an opensuse spin with media codecs and such already installed.

54

One thing I have found useful is Easy2boot. Its allowed me to rattle through loads of different live distros, trying out their compatability with my hardware and their basic config. I also have Win7/8/10 installers, DBAN, Hyrems and boot repair on the same USB drive. Manjaro has a tendency to mangle my crazy 3 drive laptop, so I repair it with that when I do a reinstall.

For me KDE is is what I like. I know its not light, but I have a quad core i7 laptop with a quadro, SSD and plenty of ram. If this was on my old Thinkpad, maybe not. I primarily went for Manjaro KDE, as I had problems with the Community spin with MATE. I like the superkey opening search. I like some of the KDE specific programs. Also I got the best battery life out of Manjaro Vs the other distros I tried. Pacman/Octopi isn't as nice as some of the more App Store like experiences, but having AUR helps.

One of the issues for me is feeling like a newbie when I have been using windowing OSs since Workbench 1.3 (1990?) and Windows since 96. Another is that my workflow seems less slick. Its hard to change. That and I have been using Photoshop for so long.

I feel like the original poster, that Win10 is treading down a dark path and that 8.1 would be a bit of a fight on Ryzen. I will likely still run it on Ryzen, but my laptop will have Linux as its main OS. In case one day MS just decides to b0rk Win 8.1 for me. Linux might be right now my life raft.

Going on Holiday soon, just taking the Laptop, so Linux it is.

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55

Easy2Boot is magic.

http://www.easy2boot.com

Easily the best software I've used for installing OSes. There are caveats when using it with UEFI, but other than that, it's been pretty great, and even better since I've learned how to deal with those caveats.

56

I'll keep that in mind, I went back to the KDE desktop now because the gnome one was just too baron and hard to configure. Plus I screwed up my libraries pretty bad by doing something wrong :frowning:

Good news is if I just reinstall and not format my home partition most my settings are ready to go. (including desktop setup and program stored settings, just reinstall those apps and boom, good to go)

57

IIARC KDE is an openSUSE favourite, so you should have no lack of support.

58

Can only really help with the mouse scroll issue.

In KDE Plasma 5 it works fine out of the box.

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59

Debian is a bit too conservative. The stable version has an old version of KDE that doesn't support scaling. You need to switch to testing to get updates.

geekdima, I tried that and it doesn't work with Chromium.

60

opensuse heavily favors kde, so people should be using that desktop when installing. Ubuntu heavily favors gnome, so thats the one to use for them IMO.

I use to use MATE because the standard Gnome desktop is so stripped down that you basically just accept what you get because customization was clunky at best... Not the case with KDE Plasma.