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Distro hoping is fine. But there is a certain feeling you get when you can fix your own problems by reading the arch wiki
I love fixing arch by reading the arch wiki, or fixing ubuntu by reading the arch wiki
I tried to find a solution for my failing marriage in the arch wiki. The arch wiki instructed me that the problem was consulting the arch wiki. Thanks for saving my marriage, arch wiki!
I set up my login manager for fedora and my grub for fedora using the arch wiki…
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Well, shit. Got 2 tebibytes to transfer, guess I’d better start now, hey?
Good thing transferring 2 tebibytes is no slower than 2 kibibytes
Just attach two of these bad boys
Instead of a bird can I just use my station wagon full of tapes?
On your other Arch laptop, obviously. You need multiple pre-owned ThinkPads loaded with Arch at any given time to maintain workable redundancy, just like you need several clean pairs of programming socks.
…“clean”? Well shit, I have some work to do then!:-P
Whenever I have a Linux box without Internet I just USB tether an Android phone—if the phone is on WiFi then it uses that (not cell), so it’s basically just a WiFi adapter that’s almost universally supported. (I think it NATs, so in some circumstances won’t work, but good enough for most emergency use cases.)
Phone or use an offline copy
Going to save this link just in case the Internet goes down one day.
I saved the comment so I can download the wiki if I ever lose internet.
Not sure that’ll work, I’ll paste the Wiki here
Beginning with Part 1 of 1,204:
Me: Oh and Mint, could you also add my old printer that I can’t get to work on any other OS I’ve tried?
Mint: Sure thing.
Mint: It’s already set up
Ha. On Windows I had this ancient Ethernet Canon IP printer. Windows hated it, even with the supplied Canon drivers and network Utility. It always needed messing with every time to get it to show up as a printer on the network.
When I moved to OpenSUSE I went into YAST2 printer discovery. It found the printer right away, and suggested a model, and asked if I wanted to install the GutenPrint driver for it. Yes please. And do you want to announce this printer to others on your network (via CUPS) Yes. Done. Worked 100% with no Canon utilities.
me: hey mint, suspend automatically.
mint: no.
me: suspend manually then.
mint: no.
me: shutdown
mint: no.
…
sudo shutdown nowdeleted by creator
sudo su - && sync && sync && sync && init 0
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For your case…
Alt + SysRq + O
My cat’s favorite key combo
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Me: Btw how old are your packages?
Mint: Its rude to ask the age of a distro
Me: well are they maintained properly?
Mint: uhhhh… Some of them are
Mint us absolutely perfect for folks like me. I want to use my computer, not work on it. I have Blender, a couple of slicers, GIMP, a couple of DAW type programs and a few other things. Perfect computer. I have no interest in the bleeding edge. Now granted, I don’t game, which saves me some grief but I guess kinda marginalizes me these days, and I’m not even hobbyist level savvy in the console, but I do hate both Microsoft and Apple, ta-da!, Mint. If there’s a better distro for me, I don’t care, I like mint.
Mint us absolutely perfect for folks like me. I want to use my computer, not work on it.
I know you’re not going to believe me, because you sound like the type of person who is “set in their ways”, but the only thing that makes Mint better for you than some other distro is that it happens to already be installed on your computer. That’s it. Mint is not the perfect choice for anyone, because it’s not particularly good at anything.
Keep using it. If it works for you, great. I don’t care what you use. But we shouldn’t be misleading people new to Linux into installing a distro that might not work for them.
Most people don’t care about version numbers of CLI software/drivers. For GUI apps there’s flatpak/snap or whatever is the official method a dev chose.
That’s a big part of why I switched to OpenSuse XD
My experience has been the opposite. I built a new PC last year, and only Fedora and Arch recognized the Radeon GPU and the Intel Wi-Fi. Mint was shipping a kernel that was too old to recognize either one.
On new hardware it’s generally easier to use a rolling release distro in my experience.
You’re more likely to have a newer kernel and drivers that support things like wifi cards.
IMO, you shouldn’t have to learn Arch just to be able to get a new PC. Eventually, people who like Ubuntu and Mint are going to want to upgrade to a new computer, and they might be in for a shock once they do. That kind of thing is what pushes people back to Windows.
If you can’t install something like EndeavourOS or tumble weed then you likely were not going to be able to reload an os anyway.
Installing vanilla arch is a very useful activity to do at least once so you know how the system works but don’t have to use vanilla Arch and can use any of the derivatives so long as it has the latest kernel / drivers for your hardware.
And IMO, that needs to change. Mint has released ISOs with updated kernels which does help. But expecting everybody to eventually graduate to a rolling release distro by the time they want to buy a new PC is just going to send people back to Windows.
Honestly, for a grandma distro, I’d use Fedora Silverblue nowadays. Very up to date, and you might as well uninstall the terminal for how useless it is.
Agreed. Out of all the distributions I have tried, Fedora (and its various spins and derivatives) are what tend to have everything actually work out of the box.
My first distro has been Nobara after swapping off windows.
It really is dummy proof.
For those on the edge. Just do it. Windows 11 is free to go back to. You risk nothing by giving Linux a try.
Thankfully Ubuntu will focus on shipping the newest kernel each release and Mint’s gonna profit of it. Also there’s newer kernels you can switch to optionally.
I tried basically every distro on my laptop and fedora worked all hardware 100% out of the box + printer + fingerprint reader + all day battery life
Fedora gnome is so good it makes Linux boring
Linux being boring is a good thing. I want my OS to be boring. I use Mint, BTW
The enterprise-adjacent distros are pretty good for that, I’ve found
e.g. RedHat→Fedora or Suse→OpenSuse
Usual suspect, the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card. Milk spoils? Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Card! Freshly divorced? Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card!
Not true, sometimes it’s DNS.
“btw can you please install the latest nvidia drivers?”
“latest?”
switches back to Fedora
Why do I need latest? Why do I need even know version of a driver for my hardware?
Someone I personally knew almost gave up on Linux because their mint install would have screen tearing issues due to an outdated driver module and kernel, since Mint follows close to Ubuntu’s kernel releases which are slow.
Cutting edge and bleeding edge kernels is one of Linux’s biggest strengths because 99% of driver modules are in the kernel, so keeping it up to date will significantly reduce the chances of issues with your hardware, especially if its anything new.
You dont need to know the version, but knowing that your updates are based on cutting edge latest stable is what can save you from driver headaches.
It’s useful to have updated drivers if a game or something isn’t working, otherwise it’s hardly a big deal, just need to keep the sysyem as up to date as it needs to run your sysyem, i’m on mint since October and never uad any headaches, even updates drivers recently to try to resolve an issue.
Fedora gnome was the definition of perfect. It was so stable that it was boring. The KDE one on the other hand…… Let’s say it has never worked for more than a day for me.
Don’t you put that evil on KDE, Ricky Bobby!!
If KDE was a woman… I’d take her out for a 3 course meal, split the bill bc she don’t need no man to take care of her (or her baby), drive her home using the scenic route, walk with her from the car to her front door, then ask for consent before giving her a goodnight kiss
my wifi in mint works perfectly. getting the screen to rotate in tablet mode is another story.
Or, you know… change the sound volume to anything between 0 or 100%.
Never had an issue with that, are you perhaps using an Nvidia gpu?
yep. I’ve used the open drivers and the Nvidia drivers. Nvidia drivers seem to work better most of the time but the screen rotation almost never works.
Weirdly, I never had an issue with screen rotation. I always keep my two side monitors in portrait mode. I found it would usually be very minor issue (usually color or compositing related), but every once in a while a new driver would just make the system unbootable and I would get to play the “boot from a thumb drive and play detective game”. If I wanted to do that, I’d play Myst or some shit :)
This juxtaposition.
Leaving aside Arch and Nix for the moment… imagine rating Ubuntu over Mint. The depravity of the human mind know no limits.
I’m a big nixOS fan but I’m also quite lazy and I will just run something like Nobara because I just want things to work out of the box and immediately be able to launch any app that I want.
Modifying everything from a single file is weirdly satisfying for me and I just stopped using it since there were some packages that just did not run on Nix.
Yeah I mean if it doesn’t run what you want then it’s not worth it 😅
If I put my Mint computer to sleep, the wifi adapter stops working completely. 🤡
First thing to do on most linux distros, but especially mint, is turn off everything sleep-related forever.
I feel like no OS can get sleep to work properly lol
Sadly, MacOS is leading the pack with sleep working as expected. This is the most cursed timeline.
If I had to guess it’s because Apple controls both hard- and software. Sleep is a delicate business where both the OS and the hardware have to work together to get it right. Linux and Windows run on an endless combination of different hardware components whereas Apple knows exactly on what hardware their OS will run.
Try to install Fedora 43 everything goes perfectly installation finished without any problems. Restart and bam I’m in my bios. Restart thinking it’a fluke, bam back to bios. Try again with a different setup USB bam bios… Ask around try what people are saying bam back to bios… This happened to me on old MSI laptop from 2015 and the new Asus from 2024… I’m beginning to think Fedora is allergic to me.
It’s probably a bootloader issue. Either grub got misconfigured, or uegi/msdos shenanigans.
How does this happen? Do not most major desktop Linux distros more or less run almost the same kernel with the same driver modules? (Except in the case of Debian being several years behind the rest).
TLDR, computer SAYS NO!
Each distro has its own flavor, and sometimes that flavor leads to things not going the way the user or even maintainer of said desktop applications intended.
But at the end of the day, there’s only one program in control of all the hardware. They’re all getting the kernel from the same place, the distros aren’t writing their own kernels except for a few tweaks here and there.
But at the end of the day, there’s only one program in control of all the hardware.
Is there though? There’s a surprising amount of layers hidden away particularly in the UI. If any one of those layers fucks up then wifi no workie. There’s also like 700 programs that all do the same thing, but not all of them work. Very fun to find out that they changed X in an update and now all the automations you had set up need updating.
I use mint, btw
