this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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My Switch to Linux is Happening Today (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by golden_zealot@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Today I am moving not only myself, but my parents to Linux!

For me this is a long time coming. I discovered and started dabbling with Linux when I was 13 or so and somehow got an image of Backtrack 5 running on a Macbook Pro without virtualization (I'm still not entirely certain how I managed it) as I was always interested in IT/Security.

Eventually I went to school for IT and I've been working in tangents of the industry ever since, though few of my workplaces have made use of Linux unfortunately.

I have been running Debian on my personal laptop for a couple years now and I have had very few problems outside of breaking my sources.list the other day when I echo'd into it with > instead of >>.

I have a friend who recently fully switched over to Arch as well, and now more than ever I have found that all my friends, including those who are non-technical, are interested in learning about or moving to Linux, so I have decided now would be a good time to be an example for them.

I have made my parents aware of the ongoing and worsening problems with Windows and that their version of the OS will be out of support soon and today I'll be putting them on Mint. I don't expect any problems as I already had them using Open Office and other such applications since they didn't want to buy licensing for MS Office years ago. Furthermore their computer has no special hardware/software otherwise, it's basically just a Micro-ITX email machine that they sometimes use for printing.

I have enjoyed using Debian on my laptop so I intend to install Debian 12 to my desktop system, though I expect some complications as it has some hardware I have not had to configure on Linux before. Specifically It has an NVIDIA EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA and an NZXT Kraken Liquid CPU cooler.

I am aware that Debian has full documentation on how to go about installing and setting up the drivers for an RTX card, but if anyone has done this, I would certainly appreciate any anecdotal advice regarding the matter as well as anything I might want to know about making sure the cooler is functioning.

If anyone wants to offer advice but needs to know more about the hardware, I have the following specifically:

  • PSU - Cooler Master V750 Gold V2, 750 Watt, White
  • Motherboard - ATX ASUS PRIME z390-A
  • Case - White NZXT H510 Elite for ATX form factor, Tempered Glass, Integrated RGB lighting
  • CPU Cooling - NZXT Kraken X53 240mm AIO RGB CPU Liquid cooler, Rotating infinity mirror design, improved pump
  • GPU - EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA
  • RAM - Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4, White
  • Storage - Two 2 TB Seagate Firecuda M.2 NVME's
  • Peripherals include a focusrite Scarlett audio interface, Wired Logitech mouse and keyboard, Logitech C920 HD Pro Camera

Thanks for any advice, and I just wanted to offer a thanks to this community at large as I have read and learned some very neat things since I joined Lemmy.

EDIT:

I have successfully installed Mint for the parents! It went off mostly without a hitch. I found that Brother provides Linux drivers/utility scripts for their printers on a per-model basis so I was glad to see they really were at my side haha. Unfortunately, while the printer is detected and prints, even after installing the scanner driver for the model, I can't seem to get the device to be detected as a scanner in either the simple scan utility or in xsane, so I will be troubleshooting that in the coming days. Otherwise I am very pleased with it.

EDIT 2:

I return to you all from my fresh Debian system!

The system, applications, and most configs have all been set now, it is mainly my files remaining for transfer.

So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done. After adding the repo's the Nvidia drivers installed like a dream. As I have 3 displays there was a little bit of fun in setting the proper display configuration for pre-login positioning, but those fixes were really quite straightforward.

It is about 5 AM so I am going to bed and continue onward into a brighter future tomorrow, but I wanted to thank you all again and provide the somewhat obligatory neofetch screenshot before I left.

https://files.catbox.moe/v8j8we.png

EDIT 3:

A final edit to this, but the parents like Mint so much that they also had me install it to their laptop haha.

So glad to see that the state of Linux as a technology is now such that people in their very late 60's who are almost entirely non-technical can not only use a Linux system as a daily driver on more than one computer, but enjoy using it :)

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[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 49 points 1 month ago (2 children)

OpenOffice

Most Linux distros come with LibreOffice pre-installed. That's what you want. OpenOffice pretty much stopped being developed in 2010 and the developers moved over to LibreOffice.

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And for some reason, to this day, I still end up accidentally calling it OpenOffice two out of three times.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 1 month ago

That's because it sounds infinitely better than LibreOffice lol

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Good to know, I'm certain they wouldn't have a problem as they learned open office easily enough. Can confirm Mint comes with Libre Office installed as well as Thunderbird which they also currently use as their email client. Thank you!

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh, so LibreOffice is actually a fork of OpenOffice, meaning back in 2010, the devs copied the code from OpenOffice and have been developing it further from there. So, it's like your parents just got upgraded to the newest edition of the office suite they were using. A lot of it should still be familiar to them.

Basically, the devs had to change the name for legal/political reasons. In all other ways, LibreOffice is the continuation of OpenOffice.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago

Beautiful, I did not realize it was a fork, this is even better news!

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Congratulations! You just made a big present for your parents 😄👌🏻

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thank you, they both like it already and my Father has said that he thinks it is much easier to find what he is looking for so I think it was a big success :)

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

This is very good to hear 😊

[–] pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Have you considered other distros? I've had lots of success with the immutable fedora variants, which offer great stability and NVIDIA drivers in the base system. If you need apt, you create a new Debian container in the box buddy and make that container be your default when opening a terminal.

Gnome variant: https://projectbluefin.io/

KDE variant: https://getaurora.dev/

Gaming variant: https://bazzite.gg/

They are all the same distro with different desktop setup and default apps. You can install one of them and seamlessly switch to another one without losing any data.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thank you for your advice, I had looked at Bazzite as well, but wanted to try for Debian first as it is simply where I have the most personal experience and I enjoy the bedrock-tier stability despite not having the cool shiny new things (There are some things I cant install yet as they are new and written with rust libs not available for the current Debian release).

If the graphics card creates too much trouble for me I am likely to distro hop and would be looking at Bazzite, EndeavorOS, or one of the other suggestions from this thread, so I really appreciate your suggestions and advice. Thank you!

[–] Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

FYI, the creators of Aurora/ Bazzite/ Bluefin are currently working on bootable CentOS stream based OCI images. This means, that you will get a LTS version, similar to Debian, but image based and WAY more slow paced.

My experience with uBlue has been flawless, but I don't know if I would recommend it to an elderly person, because they might change a bit, and change is a stress factor for many people that age.

[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Welcome! Based on the GPU I assume you're into gaming, and Debian is not the optimal distro for that because it's focused on stability and is not as up-to-date as other distros. Personally I use CachyOS (based on Arch) on my gaming PC and it works very well. EndeavourOS is similar and is also based on Arch — it's what I use on my laptop. Bazzite (based on Fedora) is another popular gaming distro. If you really prefer Debian you may also want to look at PopOS, which is based on Ubuntu, which is itself based on Debian. You can by all means use Debian if that's what you really want, but there's a good chance you'll run into issues that wouldn't appear with distros designed for gaming, especially since you have an Nvidia GPU which tend to have driver issues with Linux in general.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Thank you, all good suggestions. I have looked at Bazzite and another user had recommended EndeavourOS so if things go awry then I will likely try one of them.

I am hoping that as long as I can get the card functional I will be ok. I have been running lower-requirement games through proton on my Debian laptop without needing to install additional libraries and they all work well.

If too many problems are introduced from the card I will probably distro hop (which should be easy as I keep good backups) and see how things look elsewhere.

Otherwise I will save some money and see about a comparable AMD card going forward in any case!

Thanks for your advice!

[–] h4x0r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

focused on stability and is not as up-to-date as other distros

This community really should stop FUD peddling about debian.

stable is not the only debian release, and there are multiple ways to pull newer package versions. For instance, anyone who can read a manual can run a cutting edge rolling release debian box with this simple incantation:

sudo sed -i 's/bookworm/sid/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

stable is their default, but debian can be just as "up-to-date" as you want it to be.

[–] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 6 points 1 month ago

I assume people do not want to run an OS that has "testing" or "unstable" in its name.

If you don't need the latest packages, Debian is the way to go but if you do need the latest packages, you are much better off with a distro that is primarily made for that.

[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago

You can do that, or you can install Cachy or Bazzite and not have to take any extra steps, not to mention if you need to you have community support from people who are overwhelmingly using it for the same purpose as you rather than greybeards who never leave emacs. I'm not anti-Debian, but for a first-time Linux gamer it really isn't a great recommendation.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

I find it is all pretty relative as well. People do talk about Debian as if it's always boring and ancient, but I think the release cycle on Debian stable is something like every 2 years? So it's not super out of date for what I use. As I said in another comment I think a few rust libraries I wanted for installing the Helix editor were not available on Bookworm, but other than that there really isn't too much that I want right this second that even warrants me changing the repos to Sid. Everything I needed to install and run Kakoune was available so I'm just running that as my editor for now instead.

[–] chloroken@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wishing you luck. Linux is fun AF.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

Thank you and I agree, the power on the command line is something I miss every day I use windows so I believe I will be much happier after the switch!

[–] TheChargedCreeper864@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've been living on Tumbleweed KDE for about a year now, and I love it. My mum recently got a new laptop, so I decided to make it a dual boot of Windows 11 LTSC (no Copilot or forced MS accounts) and Fedora KDE.

Apparently Windows doesn't ship with the relevant network driver built-in, so that was fun to hunt down while Device Manager didn't announce what network card was in there. The manufacturer's site lists a certain driver as the "latest", and that would "successfully" install without actually doing anything. Half an hour later, it turns out that pressing "more" on their website shows previous versions of the driver... and drivers for a totally different network card that also gets shipped with this laptop sometimes. Naturally, the hidden one worked first try. Most other drivers were borked too, so Windows Update had to fetch them.

I then got to set up Fedora, which I chose because from what I heard it's neither boring nor too bleeding edge, without Canonical's controversial Snap shenanigans and with some relatively easy enabling of proprietary codecs (which I still need to verify) and with okay package management through Discover. The network card and everything else worked perfectly out of the box, but I have never installed Fedora before and forgot to partition the drive in Windows beforehand. Eventually I finish the install, install some apps and do some updates (while feeling uncomfortable with having to guess how package management works in dnf). I'm finally done, shut the laptop, bring it down to show her, open the lid, screen comes on...

... and then it shuts off. Turns back on, flickers a couple times, then permanently shuts off. Turns out there's a kernel bug around display power saving that's causing this, and I don't know when the fix will land on Fedora.

It's been real fun trying to explain to her that I didn't just break her fancy new laptop every 15 minutes and that everything I did was just a conventional procedure that should be supported (I'm lying)

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Best of luck to you in resolving!

My move for my parents to Mint went very well thankfully. Brother even supplies Linux drivers for their printers as a I found out and printing works great, but even after installing their scanner driver for the model, I can't seem to get any scanning softwares to detect it so I'll have to look into that part further.

Otherwise everything else runs super smooth. Now I have to deal with my system!

[–] TheChargedCreeper864@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Little update in case you were wondering. After the news of kernel 6.13 being out I decided to look up when that would be available on Fedora. I found some mentions of the display bug being resolved in 6.12.9, and it's true! Now my saga of switching a parent to Linux can truly begin!

Did you ever end up getting that Brother scanner to work?

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

No, haven't had time to trouble shoot much unfortunately. If they need a scan they just use their phones at the moment which works fine, but I still have to investigate further.

[–] Kualk@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Fedora

[–] flork@lemy.lol 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I used to hate when people would suggest a "better" distro for a newbie but now that I've tried Fedora I understand and agree that it is the best. Specifically kinote but also silverblue.

EDIT: I feel I should clarify that IMO OPs pick of Debian is also really good

[–] alxvs@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

you have a super modern pc, i'd recommend you use endeavour is so easy you just need to learn yay and pacman but honestly it is super easy

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Thank You, I will take that under consideration :)

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

My brother laser printer/scanner needed brscan in addition to (iirc) brlaser. Didn't see you mention it, so it may be worth a look if you missed it on the brother linux drivers page for your printer.

Also RIP Neofetch, maintainer became a farmer. Fastfetch iirc is the new one.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thank you! I checked and It does have both brscan3 (skips brscan as brscan3 is considered the newer version) as well as brlaser, but still no luck unfortunately.

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah damn, well sorry I couldn't be more help!

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

No worries, I appreciate it :)

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done.

Envy. I tried to install mint last night on a new computer, and it was a shit show.

  • Ethernet and WiFi wouldn't work.
  • Bluetooth wouldn't work
  • the HDMI out stopped working at some point

I did learn you can tether your phone via USB, so I got Internet that way. That was cool.

But after I got Internet working, with help from discord, elden ring and Baldur's gate 3 both failed to launch in different ways.

I gave up. Windows11 is horrible.

[–] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What's your hardware? Specifically your wireless chip(s) and graphics card.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nvidia 4070 super.

I don't remember the other details off the top of my head. Discord had me run sudo apt install linux-image-oem-24.04b and that fixed the Ethernet. They didn't really explain details, though. Maybe there were more things to do, but I didn't get more responses so I was on my own.

[–] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 4 points 1 month ago

linux-image-oem-24.04b contains newer firmware. It's quite possible that firmware for your wireless adapter was not included in the latest Linux Mint version.

The 4070 Super is more than new enough that it should work just fine with the official Nvidia driver.

If you are willing to give this another go, it might be worth booting a distro with newer packages and pre-installed Nvidia drivers just to test. You should keep your current Windows installation in case things don't work out.

Here are two distros that are fairly recent and come with Nvidia drivers pre-installed:

  • Nobara (make sure to use the Nvidia version)
  • Bazzite (choose Desktop / Nvidia / KDE / No in the dropdowns)

Everything should work out of the box with one of these without having to install anything extra or dropping to command line.

Hope that helps!

[–] leaf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I love this! The whole family ship is switching to Linux!

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

Haha, if only my brother would move away from Mac, but I understand why his use case warrants his choice.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

few of my workplaces have made use of Linux unfortunately.

Without the right punctuation, this reads as if they specifically used Linux in an unfortunate way.

You should use Linux in a fortunate way.