ForbiddenRoot

Installing arch is a pain

While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It’s still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it’s certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.

First I’ve heard of that.

It is indeed a new thing. For the reasons you’ve mentioned this was an option for enterprise customers for earlier versions of Windows as well, but this time they are making the option available to home consumers too. I can’t really see too many people paying for this though. Those who care will move on to Windows 11 (or whatever is out there by then) and others will simply keep running an unsupported / not updated OS. In all likelihood, MS will keep providing security updates for the latter for free in the end.

best hope for mainstream adoption

I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).

Gnome is nice of course in it’s own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn’t a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don’t know if that’s now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.

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Yes, it’s called “Mail” and I guess it’s the successor to “Outlook Express” from the old days. I have never actually used it though, but it’s certainly there.

This is especially funny for me because here, in India, “getting a banana” means you got nothing / got fscked over :)

Is this a smart idea?

For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most ‘real’ games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a “Game Mode” which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).

Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn’t work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don’t seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There’s either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.

Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV’s and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.

I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.

My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.

so what does Linux have that I need?

That should be the other way around, no? What do you need that Linux has (and Windows doesn’t). Otherwise it’s a case of “solution in search of a problem”. You presently do not seem to have a need as you have mentioned, so ideally you should leave it at that and continue using Windows.

What can motivate me to migrate?

While as I implied above only you can answer that authoritatively for yourself, a few examples of what other people seem to like about Linux might help perhaps -

• “Free as in beer”, so not having to spring for another license if you build another rig
• “Free as in Freedom”, which matters to many but not necessarily everyone
• Better environment for development
• Less susceptibility to malware (not necessarily because of inherent security, but also because Linux is not targeted as much)
• Heavily customizable, at the kernel, desktop environment, other software-level
• Choice of software update mechanisms as well frequency of updates depending on use-case
• Reviving of old computers where Windows would typically struggle to run
• Community participation, though this can be a hit or a miss depending on where you hang out and who you interact with

… and so on.

What is a good Linux to have for a desktop + steam?

There are many, but I generally recommend Linux Mint or Pop! OS for this use-case.

Am I missing something?

No. I think you are correct and mostly even wifi hardware works fine, at least compared to *BSDs. I use Linux across a wide-range of machines, both desktops and laptops, with mostly very recent components. The only other unsupported hardware I have personally come across is some gaming hardware (e.g. Thrustmaster racing wheels) and an add-on sound card (Soundblaster AE9). And of course, some things like DLSS3 with Nvidia do not work.

If the partitioning is fine (GPT with EFI System Partition), it should boot up even if you move the disk to a completely new machine. You will need to re-activate Windows though after booting.

You may have had the ESP on a different drive than the one you moved to the new machine, perhaps?

because if A is the string “-1” and B is the integer -1, JS evaluates A==B as true because reasons

Interesting. If it were the other way around, I think I would have been fine with it (i.e. == used for comparison with type like any other language and === without type). But as it stands now I would hate it if I had to write in JS (but I don’t so it’s fine).

I am truly and deeply saddened to hear this. My condolences to his family.

vim or vim-enhanced is one of the first things I install on any distro that doesn’t have it included by default. I have been using it for decades and am so used to seeing Bram’s name come up on the screen whenever I start the editor. His work greatly enriched my programming experience over the years and I am sure for countless other people as well. I don’t know what to say except a heartfelt “Thank you, Bram”.

I’m no huge fan of Windows, but it sounds like you had (No offense) PEBKAC errors.

I think so too and no offense meant to OP as well.

I am an early adopter of all things tech and so I had a Gigabyte Xtreme X670E mobo on pretty much day 1 to go with a 7950X. Everything worked fine on both Windows 11 and Linux despite being a pimped-up mobo and brand new CPU. At this much later date, OP’s B650 mobo should be working without a hitch, especially with Windows (and almost certainly with Linux as well).

Maybe it’s problem is that it’s boring.

Personally, I consider that a feature. Most of my machines are on Debian Stable, though I do keep a distro-hopping laptop around which is on the newly released Mint at the moment. I just use Flatpaks for the odd application that I need the very latest version of (e.g., Yuzu emulator). I will give MX a try sometime, at least in a VM.

This is like a mythical distro for me. I hear about it here and there, usually in the context of it being on top of DistroWatch and why that does not mean anything, but never really known anyone who actually uses it or recommends it.

That doesn’t make it bad or even obscure of course, because even an outstanding distro like openSuse gets very less screen-time nowadays. But somehow this is one distro I have never installed or even had the urge to find out more about.

Someday I want to teach myself emacs so that I can get rid of rest of the operating system.

I’m gonna be that person…

Well, you are not alone. While I too would prefer not to use proprietary drivers, I have had no problems on any of my Nvidia machines as well. Ironically, despite the open source drivers, getting a 7900XTX card up and running was an issue for me for months till distros caught up (with newer kernels and mesa libs), while my 4090 installation was a breeze even on the day it was released.

A lot of problems people have with Nvidia GPUs seem to be installation related. I think that is because the installation tends to be distro-specific and people do not necessarily follow the correct procedure for their distro or try installing the drivers directly from the Nvidia site as they would on Windows. For example, Fedora requires you to add RPMFusion, Debian needs non-free to be added to sources, Linux Mint lets you install the proprietary drivers but only after the first boot, and so on. Pop OS! probably makes the process the easiest with their Nvidia-specific ISO.

when you start xfce, it start with tmux?

No. I use tmux only inside the distrobox / podman dev container (which is also Debian 12 Stable). I like a more conventional DE for non-dev related usage of the computer. If I wanted a totally tmux-like or terminal-based environment I would go with i3, but that is not something I prefer for my desktop usage for non-coding activities.