@Zeppo Yeah I might try the Dual Boot system to begin with to save me time working out VMs but I think the long goal would be running a windows VM on Linux tbh.
If you must dual boot, have totally separate hard drives, and the choosing between Linux and Windows should be done in the UEFI boot menu, not GRUB menu. Windows can render Linux unbootable otherwise, requiring a rather complicated rescue. Windows would ideally not have any chance to see the Linux hard drive while booted.
An external SATA SSD in a USB enclosure is cheap these days.
Yeah, Windows likes to overwrite the MBR with no warning as if that’s perfectly fine. I’ve always wondered what combination of carelessness, incompetence, interface streamlining and competitive malice is responsible for that. It’s also ridiculous how in 2023 there’s still no native way to read Linux filesystems from Windows.
@Zeppo That does sound ridiculous especially as I wouldn't mind running linux through Windows, I know it wouldn't work as well but I know I would do a lot of my less complex tasks through there such as browsing the internet as I could game on Windows or Linux as I don't really mind if I'm VMing one
@Zeppo The goal would be to use Linux as my base OS in the future. As I look through the many comments from everyone I am now re-evaluating some of the things I feel I 'Need' in my set up such as my Sync Cloud Storage, Instead I hope to move over to External Hard Drives.
Knowing Adobe is a huge part of my setup does hurt the idea of moving to Linux at the moment but I will have to find if there is a workaround other than VMs in the future. People mentioned GPU Passthrough on the VM which would help a lot, It's just not only learning how to run a VM but how to do the pass-through on it.
But yes I do wish to move to Linux in the future but maybe baby testing the Distos I think I might like on a VM might be the best way to step into this rather than going into the deep end straight away.
Sure, installing Linux in a VM would be the fastest and easiest way to test it out and start becoming familiar! You could try a few distros/desktop environments and see what you like without having to deal with reformatting or real hardware.
I do the external usb ssd for my windows drive and recommend it endlessly. I use the windows drive for music production and the maybe 2 games in my several hundred game library that don't work in linux. 100 bucks for a 1tb samsung external ssd, and wintousb to make it functional.
@technologicalcaveman Thank you never have heard of a WinToUSB but will really need to look into it as it sounds like a great way to be able to run Linux.
It's a good tool, pretty easy to set up too. I personally recommend not connecting to internet when setting up windows 10 so that you're not forced into either signing in or signing up for a windows account. I did that and about a year later on the same install, it's all good still.
Of course harassment is never okay, but I'd say when it comes to GNOME, this is not surprising. GNOME developers have been so hostile towards both users and other developers for a long time. I'm not saying every single person associated with the project does this, but it is pretty common (e.g. here and here ). Of course the GNOME devs don't have to accomodate everyone, but it is a common theme with the project to remove features despite user backlash and also to close bugs as WONTFIX often without good explanations as to why, even when there are pull requests for fixing the problem.
I am simply avoiding the project, since there are enough good alternatives.
Definitely agree with this sentiment. Another aspect for myself -- When I tell Linux to do something, it fucking does something. No questions, no obfuscating, no disallowing in order to "save me from myself". I have a significantly increased sense of control over MY hardware with Linux.
It is frankly unfathomable to consider going back to the telemetry / spyware laden corporate controlled systems of the mainstream OSes.
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Have distro hopped over the years - most recently Manjaro to Fedora to Endeavour, but haven't found the one that's quite perfect for me.
That said, I'd make a few recommendations based on the person I'd be "marketing" to:
New to Linux, looking for polish: Mint
Mint is built off the well-known Ubuntu, polished a step further. It's in my experience the simplest to use and most generally polished of the Linux offerings. The community generally isn't as catered to power users, but if you care more about your time than about customization, I'd recommend Mint.
Looking for Stable/Modern, willing to jump thru a few hoops: Fedora
Fedora has come a long way over the years. It's far more stable, polished, and accessible than ever before. I'd hazard to call it my top recommendation, BUT, third-party software management and installation can be something of a nightmare. COPR is approximately equivalent to the AUR of Manjaro/Endeavour/Arch below, but at this time very obtuse and difficult to learn or work with. Some day you'll want a package that exists in COPR, and that day won't be fun for you.
Need apps you can't find anywhere else: Endeavour/Manjaro
Forget bleeding-edge packages and rolling release - the Arch User Repository (AUR) is hands-down the greatest feature on offer from Arch-based distros. The AUR is a repository of packages created by users that aren't supported by the main repos. If ever there's a time you need a piece of software and you can't find it anywhere else, the AUR's your best bet.
That said, I found/find both Manjaro and now Endeavour to be a little rough around the edges, and the consequence of rolling-release and bleeding-edge software is a system that isn't always working just right.
Looking to learn, straight into the frying pan: Arch
Same benefits and drawbacks of Endeavour/Manjaro above, but if you want to set up your system service-by-service, as lean as you want, Arch is there for you. A great experience if you just need an excuse to "try" putting an OS together piece by piece, even if you don't ultimately keep it in the long run.
Desktop Environments
The great DE debate. Nobody can tell you what's right and wrong here, but I have a few general breakdowns of the "big three". GNOME: If simplicity and elegance is your style. You sacrifice customization potential for cohesion and polish. KDE: Modern. Powerful. Usually polished out the gate. Can be a bit much if you're trying to tweak it tho. My personal choice. XFCE: Less modern, more friendly to lower-end systems.
Great write-up. Arch was my first experience with Linux on the desktop, and I learned so much. Would highly recommend it, even if you don’t want to stick with it.
I'm sad to hear about this, vim is a great creation and it's sad to see someone go. I didn't know anything about Bram but vim is a significant tool I use daily.
@nlm Thank you, these will come in handy and I'll have to test it out on my test rig (It's not the best but if I can test out a program on it, Might as well.)
For starters, I just want to clarify that this isn’t a shot at OP, more so this is a criticism of the linked article.
So the article can be summarized as such:
Ransomware is a problem
There are Linux versions now.
Some comments about Linux being on 3% of the desktops now. Not sure what the point of this was… since the author then says that Windows is still 80%?
Linux servers are a much bigger/viable target, because the Internet runs on Linux, including financial sector, databases, “always on” systems, etc etc…
Ends the article with generic best practices like “deploy modern EDR” and “proper backups”.
All in all, this article contributes very little in terms of informing the reader or making any sort of original or insightful claim.
Apart from Ubuntu/Fedora (which are Snap/Flatpak heavy), I think you would be OK with any Linux distribution. I have a Intel Atom N270 and 2GiB of RAM happily running Debian Bookworm and KDE (with an SSD) your talking about something with far more power.
For me the considerations are as follows.
RAM
You've listed 4GiB of RAM, looking at my PC now (Debian Bookworm, KDE Desktop, 2 Flatpaks, Steam Store and Firefox ESR running), I am using 4.5GiB of RAM.
2.9GiB of that is Firefox,
~800MiB is Steam of which 550MiB is the Steam Store Web Browser.
~850MiB is the KDE desktop
Moving to XFCE or LXDE would help you reduce the Desktop RAM usage to 400MiB-600MiB, but you'll still keeping hitting memory limits unless you install an addon to limit the number of tabs. Upgrading 8GiB in would resolve this weakness.
I get by on the Netbook limiting it to 3 tabs or steam.
Disk Storage
You've listed 500GiB of HDD Storage, this means you want to avoid any distribution which pushes Snaps/Flatpaks/Immutable OS because the amount of storage they require and loading that from a HDD would be insanely slow.
Similarly I would go for LXDE or KDE desktops, both are based on creating common shared system libraries so your desktop loads one instance of the library into memory and applications use it. As a result such desktops will quickly reach 1GiB of RAM but not increase much further.
Also moving from a HDD to SDD would give noticeable performance gains, the biggest performance bottleneck as far back as Core 2 Duo/Bulldozer CPU's was Disk I/O.
GPU
The biggest issue will be the 710M, I don't think NVidia's Wayland driver covers this era so you'll be stuck on X11. Considering the age of the GPU and the need for the proprietary driver, personally I would aim for Debian or OpenSuse the long release cycles mean you can get it working and it will stay that way.
From a desktop perspective, I would install KDE and if it was slow/tearing I'd switch to Mate desktop.
KDE has some GPU effects but is largely CPU drawn, it tends to look nice and work
Gnome 3 choses to use the GPU even when its less efficient so if it doesn't work well on KDE it won't on Gnome.
Mate is Gnome 2 and works smoothly on pretty much anything.
Cinnamon is Gnome 3
XFCE is like Mate is just works everywhere, personally I find Mate a more complete desktop.
Open source software usually doesn’t do any kind of tracking or telemetry. Sometimes it is there but then it’s usually opt-in (off by default unless you change it). Most Linux distros contain a huge amount of open source software. So all the code is in the open (which means usually no shady things going on, because a lot of eyes are looking at that code) and there’s often not even an incentive for the developers to gain money directly from the users, except through donations. So if you really like some open source project, please do contribute or donate to it.
So in the end it doesn’t really matter which distro, they all will be MASSIVELY more privacy friendly than any closed source OS like Windows, OSX iOS, or proprietary Android, although to maximize your “chances” so to speak you can go for a purely community-run distro not backed by any company (Ubuntu is backed by Canonical, Fedora is backed by Red Hat, OpenSuSE is backed by SuSE, these are the three big distros with a commercial background. I’m not saying they do violate your privacy currently, but they at least have a greater tendency to do so, because data gathered can be sold, so it might be a business incentive for them. Ubuntu sent users’ search queries to Amazon in the past to gain some more money, but the community outrage caused them to remove this anti-feature afterwards again. Fedora is currently proposing to introduce opt-out (on-by-default) telemetry, it’s not decided yet, but it’s a bit worrying still. So you see, such distros might not be the best choice for “maximum” privacy. But compared to Windows or OSX they’re still magnitutes of miles ahead.
For community-run distros, you can check out e.g. Debian or Arch Linux, or any distro based upon them. For Debian specifially, I recommend running its “testing” branch, because it’s more up to date. Don’t worry about the label - it’s still rock solid stable, because Debian has very rigid testing requirements. They test more and longer than probably any other distro, which means Debian “stable” is very well tested, but also quite outdated. To alleviate that a bit, you can use the “testing” branch. You could even use the “unstable” branch for even more up to date packages, but there’s at least a chance that you get some package dependency problems every once in a while or so, so not recommended for a beginner. Debian is also quite easy to get into nowadays, though maybe not as easy as some of the Ubuntu-based distros. Linux Mint (normally Ubuntu-based) also has a Debian-based edition these days, and Linux Mint is a great distro for beginners. Arch is hard to get into but great for modern desktop usage or gaming because it’s always super up to date. You can also check out EndeavourOS, an Arch-based clone with easier installation. Or just use any distro, really, it’s not that big of a deal currently. They all behave quite well. Mint, Kubuntu or Fedora are good starting points for beginners.
If you have to use a public computer temporarily, there’s really only one choice for a private usage in that scenario: Tails. Put it on a USB stick and use it whenever you’re on an “unsafe” computer. Tails ensures that ALL traffic will be routed through Tor so no one on the local network (or the web, for that matter) can sniff out your data transfers, among other things it does to enable anonymous computer usage (e.g. it leaves behind no logs, doesn’t save any info about your previous sessions, and so on).
It’s a bad idea to recommend Debian Testing for people who have never run Linux before. Obviously people can do whatever they want, but the whole point of Debian stable is that it is stable, and the whole point of Testing is that it’s not.
Based on the ~2 videos I’ve seen, the newly released Debian 12 stable might actually be good for newbies without being noticeably out-of-date. Thanks to Flatpak etc, new software versions can be installed / updated easily without compromising stability.
I've been using PopOS and Steam installed in Flatpak, as well as native and both have worked really well. Lutris i have installed through flatpak, as otherwise it sometimes gave me issues. This is running really well on my AMD 5950x and 6800XT
I'd just like to say that this is where things like Google Bard/Bing Chat can really help you out if you're semi-competent but stuck.
Using the output from lsblk on one of my homelab machines I get the below:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 111.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 2G 0 part /boot
└─sda3 8:3 0 109.8G 0 part
└─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 253:0 0 54.9G 0 lvm /
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 465.8G 0 part /mnt/usbhdd1
Giving Bard the prompt "how do I mount my ext4 formatted usb hard drive to /mnt/usbhdd1 at boot in Ubuntu server."
Sure, here are the steps on how to mount your ext4 formatted USB hard drive to /mnt/usbhdd1 at boot in Ubuntu Server:
Identify the USB hard drive. Use the lsblk command to list all of the block devices on your system. This will show you the UUID of your USB hard drive.
Create a mount point. Use the mkdir command to create a directory where you want to mount your USB hard drive. In this example, we will use the directory /mnt/usbhdd1.
Edit the /etc/fstab file. This file contains a list of all of the filesystems that are mounted at boot. Open the file with your favorite text editor and add the following line:
Code snippet
UUID=YOUR_USB_HARD_DRIVE_UUID /mnt/usbhdd1 ext4 defaults 0 0
Use code with caution. Learn more
Replace YOUR_USB_HARD_DRIVE_UUID with the UUID of your USB hard drive.
4. Save the /etc/fstab file and reboot your system.
After your system reboots, your USB hard drive will be mounted to the directory /mnt/usbhdd1. You can then access the files on your USB hard drive from this directory.
Here are some additional notes:
The UUID=YOUR_USB_HARD_DRIVE_UUID entry in the /etc/fstab file is the most reliable way to identify your USB hard drive. If you do not know the UUID of your USB hard drive, you can use the blkid command to find it.
The ext4 filesystem type is the default filesystem type for USB hard drives in Ubuntu Server. If your USB hard drive is formatted with a different filesystem type, you will need to specify the correct filesystem type in the /etc/fstab file.
The defaults options in the /etc/fstab file tells the system to mount the filesystem with the default options. These options include mounting the filesystem read-write and enabling file system checking.
The 0 0 values in the /etc/fstab file tell the system to not check the filesystem for errors at boot and to not mount the filesystem in read-only mode.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
bing chat:
To mount an ext4 formatted USB hard drive to /mnt/usbhdd1 at boot in Ubuntu server, you can follow these steps:
Get device info: $ lsblk or $ sudo fdisk -l
Create the mount point. In the example below, the mount point name is /mnt/usbhdd1. You can name it anything you want. $ sudo mkdir /mnt/usbhdd1
Edit the /etc/fstab file and add the following line at the end of the file:
UUID=<UUID> /mnt/usbhdd1 ext4 defaults 0 0
Replace <UUID> with the UUID of your USB hard drive. You can get it by running $ sudo blkid /dev/sdX1, where X is the letter assigned to your USB hard drive.
After you save and close the file, you can run $ sudo mount -a to mount all file systems listed in /etc/fstab.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Either Bard/Bing Chat can be a real help when you have some idea on what to do but are stuck.
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