I’ve been using Pop for a few years. I purchased a System76 laptop and decided to give it a spin since it was already installed. There’s a lot of I like about, and overall appreciate System76’s effort. It’s very stable, works flawlessly with Lutris, and the Pop store is a refreshing take on package management. Ive continued using it since at this point I’m just settled in on my OS and don’t want to bother setting anything else up lol.
That said, I’m still a much bigger fan of KDE over gnome and gnome derivatives. Pop lacks a lot of UI customization I’d really like to have. There’s also only two themes,( and im not particularly interested in learning how to replace is manually).
I am looking forward to trying out their next iteration of the Cosmic DE though. The previews look awesome and it would be a big step forward for Pop.
I’ve been running Pop_OS as the only OS for my desktop for several months. I really like it. Other than a couple adjustments on where to find things, it really was a smooth transmission. You can change the placement of a lot of elements in the settings, so be sure to poke around there to make it more like you are used to. I use mostly Steam/Proton, and it has not failed me yet. The only thing I use Lutris for is Satisfactory on Epic Games, but that also runs great.
I have been using linux mint for about 5 months and it was great so I had no intention on changing to pop os until recently. While linux mint has the same placement as windows I find pop os to be simple enough design wise that I think it might actually be easier to use than mint and windows.
I have Mint on a very old MacBook. It is definitely more akin to Windows. I went went Pop on my desktop due to the baked in Nvidia drivers. Of the 2, I prefer Pop by a long mile. To my eye, Pop is just more modern design wise and simpler to use
I actually keep a Windows dual boot specifically for BFME online play (since BFME only works singleplayer on Linux). It’s been making a comeback recently, there were 51 people online (!!! New record) just this Sunday. We played 3v3s, 4v4s, FFAs, you name it. Was a lot of fun 😄
In any case, check out the 2.22 launcher; even for offline play, it’s got built-in support for a lot of mods and plugins, and runs decently under Linux: www.moddb.com/mods/…/patch-222
Its one of my favourite abandon-ware games. I have been more interested in the campaign so I used the all in one launcher for singleplayer though I could only get 1.06 to work in wine since 1.09 in the launcher made some sort of call to the windows task manager which results in an error. I have used micro 10 in a virtual machine to test things other than bfme2, Using a vm or dual booting is a good option if you want to play bfme2 in multiplayer. I will test it out if I ever feel like playing multiplayer though I imagine most of the players are really good at pvp.
You can try different distros online using distrosea.com , if you’re not planning to use a distro with no GUI ( like Arch , where everything need terminal ) then I would recommend focusing on trying to learn dealing with DE ( like Gnome , KDE , XFCE , SWAY , etc )… while testing make sure to do things like trying terminal , playing with settings , discovering things etc , and any obstacles/questions you find you can search for its answers and solutions…
For resources, I mostly find answers and learn new things about linux from any websites I find in a web searching about Linux ( right now I only remember Linux TLDR , Arch wiki , Ubuntu forums , its foss - not only Linux focused -) , reddit , and linux@lemmy.ml community on Lemmy ( both news and questions ) For news , usually Linux community on lemmy and The Linux experiment channel on peertube ( iirc they have a YouTube channel too but I know nothing about it )
Linux has more freedom and diversity than Windows, I also wanted to try something unusual compared to the routinized experience of Windows , I wanted also to get rid of Windows restrictions ( like the need to activate Windows to fully use it while I live in a country where there’s no way to activate it , ads and such things )
KDE’s Plasma and apps are getting pretty usable touch-modes. Like automatically increasing spacings even on flight when you flip a convertible, but not just that. I’m on opensuse leap 15.5, with plasma 5(.27?).
For the on screen keyboard… I use Maliit. I have built it locally, it was a pain. But it works. It has a layout for my relatively rare language, and it’s integrated with plasma enough that you can enable-disable its autopopup with the taskbar icon. It’s not super convenient because all the buttons are spread over the 12" screen, but better than having to flip back to laptop to use a keyboard when I don’t need to type too much.
On wayland it has problems. With some apps it works… for others I have disabled wayland and made the app run in xwayland with an envvar. If you are interested, I can help you set it up, it’s not too much work but the magic words to make it work are not that easy to find.
First of all, if you’ll be using Bazzite, then become familiar with its documentation. Other sources may not necessarily translate that well to Bazzite due to Fedora, Atomic, OCI and SELinux (to name a few). Though, some other sources may benefit you as long as it doesn’t contradict with Bazzite’s own documentation.
so, what are your tips and tricks for a new linux user?
Bazzite is on Fedora Atomic’s model, hence you should become familiar with the built-in rollback mechanism. Furthermore, it’s possible to keep deployments around. Therefore, if anything, consider utilizing this on your first deployment; just in case.
Pinning said deployment is possible with the sudo ostree admin pin <insert number> command after installation. The number can be deduced through the rpm-ostree status command. The first deployment’s corresponding number is 0 and for each deployment found below you just have to increase the number by one to find its corresponding number. So, the 4th deployment corresponds to the number 3. Btw, you can pin multiple deployments. So there’s no opportunity cost involved. Finally, you can unpin a deployment with -u. So sudo ostree admin pin -u <insert number>
as a final question, what got you into using linux over windows or mac?
I was never a mac user in the first place. As for Windows, a hardware failure was causing more issue on it than on Linux. So that was the direct cause. But the reason I got interested into Linux initially and what has kept my interest are privacy and freedom respectively.
hey, sorry this is coming late! thank you for this. I was already looking at their documentation (I have a few times, as well as read their discourse forum) and joined their discord in preparation.
I think this is a super good tip because I have been trying to parse what all I’d need to get familiar with before I touch anything install wise. I knew about the pinning a deployment thing, but I didn’t fully understand how, so thank you for laying it out for me!
Don’t follow tutorials, understand them. I’m so tired of seeing useless uses of cat because some asshole writing a tutorial 20 years ago decided to illustrate how pipes work with a good ol cat file | grep string as if grep didn’t take a file name as an argument.
The more time I spend being mad about this the more I notice people using horrible practices in tutorials because they’re too lazy to setup a legit use case.
A new user sees this and thinks this is how grep works.
Loops are another common one. People going around not knowing you can pass a glob to a shell for loop. Because the tutorial they read was lazily written and they didn’t bother to understand the bits of what they were being shown, only how to reproduce/mangle the command until they manage to get close enough to what they want out of it.
I’m absolutely going to do my best to understand and not copy/paste without doing that. I don’t like doing things to my computer that I don’t know what is happening, so that makes sense to me! I already ran into that issue plenty of times with my servers, so I’m trying to go all in now.
For new Linux users a good start would be YouTube vids
after that I’d personally recommend the Arch Linux Wiki as it’s a well regarded and well known encyclopedia for anything you’d need/want to know about most Linux related things
beyond the Arch Linux wiki, you’d probably be looking at the Linux kernel documentation or Gentoo’s docs/wiki
Solutions found on either of these wikis may work perfectly fine on other distros, but it’s not a guarantee. ‘Seasoned’ users should be able to distinguish this.
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve been following this project for a while and it’s been great seeing all the improvements over the years. I recommend checking out this video on its current state: youtube.com/watch?v=nWjAxNHXd_8
Equally, or possibly more interesting, is their Ladybird browser, which is cross-platform. Its been making great progress as well, and I sincerely hope that it can compete with the big two some day - would be nice to have a major browser/engine that’s not based on Webkit or Gecko.
I wish 90s interfaces would make a comeback, I really miss the aesthetics of that era. Luckily there are some excellent themes out there that scratch that itch, like Chicago95 for XFCE - and here’s bonus a screenshot of it running on my Galaxy Fold 4:
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