Just disable the silent installation of suggested programs.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/68217-turn-off-automatic...
Or use any software like ShutUp10.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/68217-turn-off-automatic...
Or use any software like ShutUp10.
I shouldn't have to scour third party forums, trying to find out what horrible next thing I have to disable, or be on top of, else my OS will cause me more issues, problems, etc.
And it isn't even a one off. Surprise! Microsoft will add wonderful new ways to cause you issues.
So it's almost like you have to be subscribed to some "how not to get screwed on your new computer and OS" list, and be right on top of it all.
Which is the point really. Exhaust the end user in submission.
Well, CUPS has been owned by Apple for a while, "want to support" is an understatement.
Debian is stable, but slow, I think of it as "vanilla linux". Most software everywhere is available as dpkg packages, either through apt or through download, and the packages in the repositories are well maintained.
Arch is a rolling updates -based distro with a user repository, so you get even more packages, and you never have to do a separate major distro version update. Arch might require some setting up, but if you can follow a checklist, the installation should be rather easy (although, idk maybe there has been more work done on installation wizards lately)
Alternatively, Arch is nice in that most of the derivatives are compatible with the main line, so here you could opt for e.g. Manjaro or Arcolinux, these give you nice preconfigurations for desktop environments etc., which you would have to setup yourself with vanilla arch.
openSUSE is an opinionated and fully featured distro with a lot of really nice features. It's stable, the distro is backed up by an enterprise version (SUSE linux), and gets some of its stability and featureset from the money, requirements, and attention of an enterprise customer base
FWIW people said the same thing about Ubuntu.
To be perfectly honest. Mint is a decent enough way to get started.
Yes, it's easy to use, yes, that's a good thing.
One very unfortunate thing with "easy to use" distros is that when it fails it's much harder to fix than ones with a steeper learning curve for some reason. But most people have this issue with Windows already.
All things being equal: I would not suggest someone who wants to "get things done" immediately with a linux OS & coming from Windows: to use Arch or Debian.
Most likely I would recommend something like Mint, because it just "gets out of the way" most of the time for the majority of users.
This isn't a holy war, this is pragmatism, and giving people choice is not actually helping them adopt a linux that's best for them.
Just use Mint until you find it has limitations you can't bear, then you'll have enough buy-in and understanding to jump to something that suits your needs. But making the jump in the first place is the most important part. Not what you jump to.
Easy to use is valid.
As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux.
I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint.
I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing.
Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint.
I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.
It's probably slow to be up to date with the latest versions of the installed packages. Not a big deal for people using only browsers (they are regularly updated) and LibreOffice (any version will do) or developers (we use docker and language managers, right?) but there might be some class of users that want to stay closer to the edge.
Anyway it always feels strange when someone claims X is slower/faster than Y, where X and Y are both ~the same kernel and the base system. As if debian maintainers didn’t know some secret “non_vanilla_run_faster: true” settings for the same kernel that was 30 years in development already. Most distros are just slightly different gui programs running on top of basically the same gnu/linux binaries.
Nothing wrong with the performance!
It also brings useful power modes and makes installing drivers easy.
It seems to be pretty similar to FancyZones. Users who moved from windows may find it useful, especially compared to usual learning curves of tiling wms.
I used it recently and it gave me a really good impression.
I thinks they’re using Ubuntu LTS as a base so stable but not cutting edge.
- Nvidia drivers have no per-app settings (I use that) and few settings in general
- It’s unclear if gsync works
- Window movement and scrolling is 30fps-ish despite the RR is 144hz; tearing
- I hoped for better ui scaling, turned out it only has 1x and 2x(4x) as “clean” options. On a 1440p display everything looked either too small or too big
- Couldn’t set up the mouse pointer to just do what my mouse says (it has metal pads and “precision” rug, all movement is linear) (custom drivers windows-only)
- Sleep function couldn’t deep sleep, only blanked display
- No chance to get random hw like usb wifi to work
- No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools
Ymmw, but when it does not, it’s a rabbithole not worth falling into.
Sad thing is, I’m far from being a newbie. I was an administrator for a whole small office of bsd/linux boxes for few years. You can imagine the volume and the depth of that job. There’s no “can’t do” option. I can solve or at least dig deep into these issues, but after getting this experience and year after year failed attempts to get it right I had to say “no more”. If it doesn’t work as is, for me it doesn’t work at all.
But you’ll probably be fine if your hardware, software and use cases are as standard as can be.
As for proprietary tools from hardware vendors, that's exactly the kind of software that users don't want. It's literally the whole point of this article. OC / monitoring / fan control should work with standard tooling. It should never require bloatware with flashy "gaming" UIs that advertises its presence in the taskbar and phones home all the time.
Also, as much as I enjoy tinkering with my computer, I'd throw it out the window in frustration if I ever feel the need to manually control the fan while using it.
Same for mouse setup. It's just a bunch of controls that should have been in standard settings of both OSes. Because having a precise pointing device and not being able to turn off some pre-defined "pointer enhancement" bullshit built into an OS is just stupid. These "accelerations" stopped making sense ages ago. I find it ironic that a Proprietary RGB Gaming Mouse Manager actually turns off enhancements and gets off the way.
About sleep, well. Never seen non-working windows sleep myself, neither heard about that from anyone I know. But on linux it is among things that I never even expect to work, regardless of hardware (unless it's an old mid-tier bestseller).
The difference in our experience likely depends on hardware preferences, mainly main board and graphics card. But I'm not going to add another level of insecure pickiness to purchases or to replace around $1-1.5k total in PC parts to maybe please an OS. I know proprietary hardware is not linux'es fault, but if it doesn't work, it does not.
My advice to tfa is to just never buy HP, which is a definition of scam.
Mint ships with DEs that aren't great at supporting modern features like fractional scaling. KDE is my preferred choice of DE these days. In fact, I am skeptical on recommending Mint with very new hardware (if this hardware is new).
For me I have a generally opposite experience with my machines, but as you said, it's probably cause of my hardware. I avoid NVIDIA nowadays since I don't trust them with Linux, and generally don't buy unusual or fancy hardware for that same reason.
> No proprietary OC/monitor/fan control tools
As for fan control, at least on AMD GPUs while I was still still running Mint, I needed a script to get fan control to work. https://github.com/dasunsrule32/radeon-scripts. Bright side is that it isn't proprietary, while dark side is it isn't as intuitive as something like MSI Afterburner unfortunately.
As of now my desktop (which ran Mint) now only runs Windows because I uninstalled Mint thinking it had problems when it was actually RAM. But I also recently got back into Linux with Fedora running KDE Wayland on my ThinkPad since I needed to get a macOS VM working (on the Windows side apparently only Windows 11 can do this properly but I dislike Windows 11), and I am generally pleased with the experience apart from my fingerprint reader not working. Though I don't know if I will stumble into another roadblock again that has nothing to do with the distro itself.
However two points keep me from moving over. First is the lack of any good RDP alternative for remote desktop sessions. Nothing I've found so far for Linux is close.
Second is full-disk backups. This has saved my ass a few times over the years, and the ability to be back in action in 30 minutes with minimal loss after a disk crash is something I don't want to be without. Thanks to the Volume Shadow Copy[1] service, the cloning can be online and done in the background while I use the machine.
I know ZFS on root would get me close, allowing me to send snapshots to a backup server, but as much as I like ZFS it's a complicated beast and I see too many issues on the mailing list to feel comfortable doing that.
That said, the list is getting shorter each year, so maybe one day soon.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/fil...
I am surprised. I may have had to restore only one computer in a decade because of a hard drive failure.
I think full disc backup is rarely seen on linux systems because the system itself make it so easy to reinstall the way it was.
The only thing I really need to backup to be able to reinstall quickly my fedora is:
- the list of rpm groups and packages that are installed
- the list of flatpak apps that are installed
- a backup of my homedir
- a tarball of /etc
- a kickstart file describing the installation, partitionning, etc.
You don't even need a pxe + tftp server to install from kickstart, just a netinstall iso image and you can pass the `ip=dhcp` and `ks=http://somelocalip/ks.cfg` network parameters at boot to initiate install
It may take a bit more than 30 minutes to reinstall + restoring /home and /etc but you are rolling up again quite quickly. In fact I have tested it much more than I have needed it.
Though I've upgraded disks multiple times by cloning to the new drive, very smooth so that's a nice bonus.
The main thing is that's so simple. There's one thing to remember, and I get back exactly what I had. Having to manually curate a list of things to back up is exactly what I want to avoid, since I might miss something important and only know when it's too late.
Full disk recovery was very useful when computers were offline but nowadays you can install apps so quickly you can do it on demand really. I've been in situations where I would switch from one computer to another and I would just copy the homedir. The apps are just installed whenever I need them. Oh needs git, awscli or kubectl? 30s later all are installed and in use.