Forum menu
I used nano/pico for years precisely due to that 🤣
But eventually I faced my fears and learnt to press : then x or q.
Errrmmmm - I discovered why my pc was running badly - the fan was blocked with dust bunnies.
Other than that which rather shows my level of PC skills what I have decided is to buy a secondhand computer and try mint with that but haven't got any further
sorry
this post didn't seem to appear "awaiting moderation"
Good thing about vi (only good thing about vi?) is that you're guaranteed that it's present - at least on "Single UNIX". I used it for years and learned a load of stuff that I can't remember for the life of me. Another of those things that turn out to have been an utter waste of time.
Time for a thread reboot...
The mrs' laptop isn't Windows10-able so we had a fascinating afternoon the other day switching between multiple distros to see which she wanted to use instead.
She'd never tried Linux before so after trying a few she decided on Zorin OS 18 as it was the most "normal". Interestingly, and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, she hated Ubuntu because it was "weird".
I, in the other hand, have decided to switch to Pop!OS Cosmic - very quick and looks smart. It's still only in beta but everything seems to work fine.
Any progress TJ?
also, some handy open source image tools available GIMP I suppose is still going but darktable looks like a very neat Lightroom alternative
Darktable is extremely powerful but the downside is that with great power comes a diabolical user interface and a very steep learning curve. You get to play with masses of parameters but understanding what you’re doing requires a PhD in digital image processing.
Zorin
Zorin make some interesting but very vague claims about their Pro version that costs £48. Looks like you're paying for freely available Open Source Software software.
I like on the main page that there's footage of someone playing Slime Rancher (In Victor's Lab catching glitch slimes).
2/3rd of the way down the page there's a slider about PC<>Device communication, I'm wondering what they use for that, I'm still a plug-phone-in-with-usb-cable guy!
I am going to install Linux Mint with Cinnamon on one of my old PC. I meant to try out Linux many years ago but did not do so because I only had one PC and didn't want to mess with dual booting etc. I also found out that that I don't have to dual boot now and can easily use VM for Microsoft stuff. Rather than wasting my old PC, I shall put it to good use and hopefully will last for many more years.
I think the Zorin Pro pricing is pretty fair, you can easily get the software yourself for free but you do get the extra desktop pre-sets ready to go.
I've always considered the Pro version to be more of a "support the devs and get some extras pre-installed" type thing rather than anything drastically different.
There's possibly also something to be said for the idea that the usual situation of distros being free leads to people not valuing them as much and that having a cost provides a sense of value.
Still not convinced by Zorin.
I thought I updated to three latest version of Fedora a while back, but I missed the most crucial part of the process: the actual upgrade!
Doing it now. There's nearly 8400 packages to update. It's taking some time. Think I should uninstall a considerable amount of crap that was installed to try, but never since used!
Am tempted to try a different distro, but there's always that uncertainty over those few little custom things I did and forgot about and how to find that info again.
A Linux Mint install should do those things for youI repurposed an ancient mini laptop (10" screen thing) running an Atom processor with an earlish version of Mint (probably about 2010?). Took about an hour to set up, connect to the NAS in my place, get spotify running, connect to various bits of google, connect to both printers and get the music streaming set up (BT i thinki), plus open office. Used that for surfing, word processing and music for about 5 years until something failed terminally inside the motherboard.
I'd never played with any Ubuntu/Linux before and probably only use the command prompt about twice a year, my last programming experiences were with turbo pascal and C++ at uni... 20 years earlier. It wasn't difficult, but did need some googling. I can't imagine it's anything else than a massive load easier now.
The vast bulk of PC hardware is manufactured in China, by any measure, orders of magnitude worse than a few software companies bending the knee to Trump.
I stayed up until half 2 last night! After a quick search for Linux distribution recommendations, I decided to install Manjaro Linux. It's based on Arch Linux, but is more for regular users who just want things to work (Arch is very hands on and technical but I used it for ten years until I lost interest in the constant maintenance required).
When I installed Fedora, despite my reservations about doing so, I followed the recommendation for root and home to be on the same partition. That was the cause of the data rearranging. I wanted to keep my data but there was nowhere to install Manjaro without wiping it. After deleting the root folder, there was still near 700gb data. I was expecting it to take hours but gparted shrunk the partition in somewhere around ten minutes. That made space to create a new partition to install Manjaro (OS & applications).
Also on that SSD was a /boot partition and a /boot/efi partition and another SSD with the same but for a Windows 11 installation. I decided not to format any of these due to uncertainty and just told the Manjaro installer to use the old Fedora /boot and /boot/efi partitions without formatting them.
Manjaro uses a LTS Linux Kernel (Long Term Support - more reliable for stability) but Fedora didn't. So when the installtion of the boot loader (Grub) saw the latest installed Fedora kernel it set that as the default kernel to boot with, which of course didn't work. Looking at timestamps helped decide which stuff out of the /boot and /boot/efi folders to delete. I then just re-installed the bootloader to trigger its configuration.
TLDR; So, basically, when you install Linux, keep /home (where user data is stored) on a separate partition to /root (OS & software) because it will make life easier in the future.
Just in case potential new users of Open source operating systems weren't scared off by my previous post... I've remembered why Fedora persuaded me to install to a single partition. It was a BTRFS partition (Btr File System). Then, within the BTRFS partition there are subvolumes for /home and / (root). So another level of abstraction to wrap my head around. A level which is hidden when working with partitions in the partition editor (Gparted), and neither made clear with the installer. So technically, it should have been possible without me shrinking the entire btrfs partition and creating a second btrfs partition. Still puzzled to be honest.
The mrs' laptop isn't Windows10-able so we had a fascinating afternoon the other day switching between multiple distros to see which she wanted to use instead.
You mean Windows 11, surely? In any case you can easily bypass the hardware check and install W11 even if you haven't got the thing it supposedly needs.
I do mean Windows 11, in my head I was thinking "not upgradeable from Windows 10" bit then just mangled the sentence!
Yeah, we could go with a workaround but basically, I can't be bothered with Windows anyway, too "intrusive" in terms of suggestions and ads for other MS products etc. And I know I can do minimalist installs but when I'm at the point of using workarounds to make my workarounds work, for something I don't particularly like anyway, I'm just going to use something else.
2/3rd of the way down the [Zorin] page there's a slider about PC<>Device communication, I'm wondering what they use for that, I'm still a plug-phone-in-with-usb-cable guy!
To answer my own question, if you choose the KDE graphical environment, then KDE Connect. Or if you choose Gnome, then GSConnect. Of course I chose neither of those two, I like Cinnamon, however GSConnect works with that, but requires a little setup. I can now send files between my mobile and desktop over the local network faster than via USB cable - from context menu in file manager on desktop, and as option for sharing on mobile (mobile needs KDE Connect app from play store no matter what you use on your desktop).
I will be staying with W11 because I just can't be bothered making a decision at home after making them at work all day, I'll just do what everyone else does.
Zorin Connect is genuinely impressive, I've not tried KDE connect so that might be exactly the same but being able to use my phone as a pointer across multiple monitors blew my mind. No idea when I'll ever use that feature but it's one of those things that just seems like witchcraft.
Using it as a trackpad was good as well, but that's one of those things I've always thought should be common practice so I'm less amazed by that!
I have an old pc that was not capable of Win 11. I have installed a 500gb SSD and a Linux based system called Zorin. Boots in seconds and does everything I need it to do. I did use Google to find the driver for my printer I think.
BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA, then try anything you like.
Linux Mint here.
If only I could get Insta360 to work on Mint.
Windows 11 will be binned ASAP.
If only I could get Insta360 to work on Mint.
What have you tried? I don't have one myself, but would quite like one. I've noticed filters in Shotcut for working with 360 footage - but reading about it, it needs to be a certain type of projection (and you need Insta360 Studio to convert their proprietary format for that IIUC).
Searching seems to yield people who say Insta360 Studio works in Bottles (ie a Wine variant). Others say they had it working in Steam using Proton (which I'd be tempted to try given the Windows games that run fine with it).
TLDR; So, basically, when you install Linux, keep /home (where user data is stored) on a separate partition to /root (OS & software) because it will make life easier in the future.
Or easier still, just flatten the lot and then restore data from your backups.
You mean Windows 11, surely? In any case you can easily bypass the hardware check and install W11 even if you haven't got the thing it supposedly needs.
How does one do this?
S'alright, I googled it.
I've just had the displeasure of setting up Windows 11 (Pro) for the first time on a new laptop. I had no idea it was this bad from a fresh start.
The lockscreen is rammed with ads; it's slow (on a brand new Ultrabook with 32GB RAM you can see File Explorer windows open and fill in with content section by section); Copilot is EVERYWHERE; "sponsored" apps are all over the place in the Start Menu; Bing search doesn't; the amount of shit you have to agree to during the OOBE is horrendous... I mean, the list goes on forever.
I think I'd disabled these things bit-by-bit on my old laptop but to be presented with them out of the box like that is appalling. I know Windows is more or less free now but I felt like I was the product from the very start.
Although Siri annoys me in MacOS, Windows 11 is on a whole new level of awfulness. Clearly no senior Microsoft employee uses their own products because they'd never tolerate this.
This particular laptop won't run Linux (no Intel WiFi 7 drivers yet and the trackpad doesn't work) but I implore anyone who's just gone through the same experience as me to give it a try. Even Omarchy has a better out of the box experience and you need to use bloody text files to configure the UI.
Or easier still, just flatten the lot and then restore data from your backups.
What is it the backups? 🤣
This particular laptop won't run Linux (no Intel WiFi 7 drivers yet and the trackpad doesn't work) but I implore anyone who's just gone through the same experience as me to give it a try. Even Omarchy has a better out of the box experience and you need to use bloody text files to configure the UI.
Some distros have a driver manager that sort this out for you, but if not Intel do something
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/824804/intel-wireless-wi-fi-drivers-for-linux.html
on a brand new Ultrabook
Is an Ultrabook an HP thing by any chance? I refuse to buy them as they are loaded with crap that wants to take over. All of the Lenovo machines I've bought have been pretty clean
W11 isn't slow on my work laptop although it was quite busy for the first week or so indexing stuff or whatever it was doing.
W11 definitely slower than W10 on my previous work laptop. Was an HP Ultrabook, but IMHO consumer grade, not enterprise grade, acquired in the post pandemic era when you got what was available rather than something that met our requirements. Almost every single one either physically broke within 2 years or the screen went yellow or the LCD backlight popped.
Normally when you do a clean install you either expect or notice a speedup as all the cruft gets nuked. When almost every member of our team (about 50 people), including the secretary and non-techy people mention the slowness, you know you aren't the only one imagining it.
On the current new laptop (Dell enterprise grade) it is not any quicker than that shyte HP.
Plenty of bugs too, but at least the most annoying of those goes back to at least Win8, so I can't blame that on Win11 specifically. And all the usual reddit etc posts with fixes are a complete load of tosh by people that haven't a clue what the frick they are talking about. Will just have to suffer with it, cos I ain't wasting any more time.
At least I can do a full Arch Linux install on my personal PC in a fraction of the time one can do a Win11 install. With a whopping 1 command on the command line too.
At least I can do a full Arch Linux install on my personal PC in a fraction of the time one can do a Win11 install. With a whopping 1 command on the command line too.
What's the command?
Hopefully you've done it the slow painful countless commands way at least a handful of times! Page by page of the greatness that is the Arch Wiki.
Oh yes, done the hard graft "proper" way many times, just so I can say I use Arch btw 😉 Although I think the NixOS users have stolen that accolade.
# archinstall
😀
NixOS looks interesting, and in the past I might have been tempted.
Reproducibility of a system looks like a good thing. I think at one point I'd started on a script which got me the base Arch Linux system + Xorg.
Watched a half-hour video of a guy who used NixOS for 9 months, pretty interesting. No mention of how updates work though. Nor of how much storage space is required. Would a NixOS user be using it to create a fully-fledge Windows-like environment, would it work well for that or just demolish your free-drive space? Are NixOS users more naturally inclined to minimal specialized development environments?
The home manager idea sounded good too. Could have done with that when I installed Manjaro.
I've had to recreate some of my customizations (ie customization as through configuration within /etc/ or ~/.*, basic scripts, etc, stuff I'd forgotten about) due in part to laziness, and in part due to knowing that in losing things you sometimes find new things to take their place, **** it!
The main thing I missed going from Arch to Fedora was pacman... I just never bothered to learn how to use Fedora's dnf on the commandline. Think that's the main reason I went with Manjaro.
pacman -Ss possiblepackagenamesudo pacman -S actualpackagename
So easy. It was something regularly being broken and shit tonne of reconfiguration after updates that I could no longer stomach with Arch.
This is timely. Not in IT, vaguely ok with computers etc. I have an external hdd with Bazzite on, which I could use to boot into my work windows 10 Thinkpad and play some old games, without installing anything on said laptop.
Now I have a windows 11 Thinkpad. Booting into anything but the installed Windows 11 seems impossible, despite asking it to boot from USB in the Bios.
I’m sure there’s any number of reasons, but asking is free.
This is timely. Not in IT, vaguely ok with computers etc. I have an external hdd with Bazzite on, which I could use to boot into my work windows 10 Thinkpad and play some old games, without installing anything on said laptop.
Now I have a windows 11 Thinkpad. Booting into anything but the installed Windows 11 seems impossible, despite asking it to boot from USB in the Bios.
I’m sure there’s any number of reasons, but asking is free.
Booting an operating system from USB requires the USB drive to have a bootable image on it.. If that makes sense
Now I have a windows 11 Thinkpad. Booting into anything but the installed Windows 11 seems impossible, despite asking it to boot from USB in the Bios.
Although you have an OS on an external drive, the installer will have written the stuff it needs to boot onto the main drive (ie, the one in your old laptop). You'll need to install it again and for the love of god make sure you have your full Windows password handy, an internet connection, and the 2FA set up if you need it, because otherwise you won't be able to log in.
Ah, thanks.
I think I’ll leave it alone then. I still have the old laptop, which isn’t ‘managed’ by the IT company.
Might as well just install Bazzite on the old Laptop as it’ll just end up being recycled.
The only W11 issue I have is that the background CPU usage seems a touch higher than it should be, at about 5%, and consequently battery life is only about 5-6rs instead of 7-8 that I would expect. It might have something to do with corporate AV settings for Defender being a little more aggressive, since it's the Defender processes that are showing up.
I wish that was the only issue I had with W11.
TBF my long list is nothing like as long as Lotus Notes. But then that had more bugs than there are insects in the world.
And many that I call W11 bugs are (being pedantic) somewhere in the mess of tools and apps that make up what ought to be rebranded MS Cloud. My most annoying is 100% W8, W10, W11 user interface though and happens right at the most inopportune moment. Next most annoying is probably Outlook (and before you ask, no I mean Outlook, not the other Outlook 😉 ) but might be Onedrive or Sharepoint, and is more of a retarded feature than a bug. And the keyboard shortcuts and Start Menu is most definitely a retarded feature and a regression from W10, and evidence that W11 devs and management don't use W11 for productivity. As a Yahoo dev once told me when I reported an issue... "you're not supposed to use it, you are supposed to experience it".
Setting up a second laptop. Different manufacturer. Can't get past the "we're installing updates" bit of the Windows 11 setup process.
Do you think Microsoft execs actually use Windows, or are they all Mac owners?
I think some people are just angry 😉
Honestly all I do with Windows is press the start key and type in the name of an app I want. Then sometimes I add bluetooth devices.
Back on topic, I discovered the text-based resource-monitor eye-candy that is btop today 😀
(Alas the image scaling doesn't do it justice)
Setting up a second laptop. Different manufacturer. Can't get past the "we're installing updates" bit of the Windows 11 setup process.
Do you think Microsoft execs actually use Windows, or are they all Mac owners?
Amusingly when I went to the gnome conference approx 50% of attendees seemed to be using windows 🙂
And the keyboard shortcuts and Start Menu is most definitely a retarded feature and a regression from W10
Re-enabling keyboard shortcuts is now in Accessibility settings. Like, what the actual... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you think Microsoft execs actually use Windows, or are they all Mac owners?
As far as I'm aware (and hearsay and conjecture are kinds of evidence), most of MS still use W10 internally.
Amusingly when I went to the gnome conference approx 50% of attendees seemed to be using windows 🙂
It's a height thing. Linux simply goes over their heads