jadsel

joined 1 year ago
[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As a tinkering old nerd who mainly runs Garuda these days, I would throw in that the added GUI tools don't have to be in the way. It is Arch under the hood, and you can totally ignore Garuda's add-ons and just proceed like you would on vanilla Arch whenever you feel like it.

Best of both worlds, really. The GUI tools are still there whenever you do want to use them, but it's also just Arch. I like MX Linux for similar reasons, as someone who started out on Debian back in the day. Useful for solving problems in both cases, too.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Garuda is actually my daily driver these days, and I quite enjoy it. It does mostly just work, and I also like their desktop theming. The GUI installer is great for easy hardware detection and setup. But, that's coming from a more experienced old tinkerer who was initially looking for some lazy troubleshooting with NVIDIA graphics on a new gaming laptop, and liked the distro enough to end up switching over.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend any rolling release to someone completely new to Linux. The devs have done a pretty good job at making some things more user friendly, but we are talking about Arch with some extra tools bolted on. You'd better be prepared for things to break occasionally, and to need to do some tinkering around under the hood.

On the plus side, you ARE dealing with Arch with all the info resources/user community built up around that, plus the Garuda community tends to be pretty helpful from what I've seen. You are going to periodically need to figure out how to fix stuff, however--and better to be aware of that going in. Some people are going to be more fine with the idea than others, but it is liable to provide a steeper learning curve for someone just getting started with Linux.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 4 points 1 month ago

I ended up getting reevaluated for some reason in high school back in the '90s, by a complete pompous asshole. So, according to this dude, not preferring to sit at the front of a classroom is proof positive that it cannot possibly be ADHD. I must just be lazy and manipulative. (That second part was a new one, at least. Trying to dodge accountability? Idek.)

That was it, that was the entire rationale stated for why ADHD was supposedly no longer an issue in my life. I am not joking. Thankfully my parents thought he sounded full of it too, and did arrange for a more comprehensive educational reevaluation through a university center. Where my own seating preferences never came up, incidentally.

Yeah, I also had PTSD and actual (partly documented) reason not to trust some people behind me at that school. Turns out I'm also on the autistic spectrum. I still have not magically grown out of either thing, 30+ years later. Funny how that works.

That little anecdote aside, I do get the idea that this is probably one of those longterm received wisdom things. Just because it's a go-to suggestion, doesn't mean that this strategy is going to work best for everyone. Useful point to bring up, OP.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 6 points 1 month ago

The Crock Pot branded essentially knockoffs are good. We've had one for years. Haven't seen anything about ill-advised political pandering there so far, at least.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 3 points 1 month ago

Yep, and that applies even without any existing health concerns going in. Better hope you don't develop any while living under those conditions.

I'm T1 diabetic, and have an unfortunately reasonable expectation that even a week spent in jail back in the US could very easily turn into a death sentence. It does happen with depressing regularity. That's just looking at one very straightforward (and easily treatable) chronic condition, and a couple of fairly recent examples which have gotten more publicity than most such cases ever will. It's a mess.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 1 points 2 months ago

Yep. (Though I'm going through Chaotic-AUR rather than Mullvad's own repo.) It does get a little annoying, but hey.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 1 points 2 months ago

This is using a combo of a phone running GrapheneOS, and Linux on desktop. It's an ongoing process.

  1. Infomaniak KMail for anything that matters. I do still have a couple of Gmail accounts, and have continued to use one of them to give out publicly and catch spam. FairEmail as a mobile client for them all. Infomaniak's webmail is decent, and I just use it on desktop.
  2. Infomaniak KDrive / just physical backups. Considering self-hosting Nextcloud for some of it. KDE Connect helps with syncing across devices.
  3. OsmAnd~ / OpenStreetMap where practical. I do occasionally resort to Google Maps on an old Android phone for navigation.
  4. Mostly been using my distros instance of SearX on desktop, DuckDuckGo elsewhere.
  5. Firefox still on mobile / preferably FireDragon on desktop / Vanadium is also good on mobile, but I missed the easy cross-device syncing.
  6. Strictly local data Fossify Calendar on mobile, importing and sending .ics events as need be.
  7. Don't really have a need for contacts management outside of phone contacts and e-mail.
  8. My own ad hoc ADHD Brain workaround setup that probably wouldn't transfer well. Quillpad looks good on mobile though, with Nextcloud sync to take it across platforms.
  9. LibreOffice whenever I do need anything like that these days, with KDrive sharing as required.
  10. Matrix. Using a public homeserver that runs a bridge to Google Chat (among other services), with my partner still using GChat exclusively.
  11. Rarely comes up, but probably also Matrix with the bridges.
  12. Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, besides obviously Lemmy. I don't really do social media these days.
  13. Spotify. Prefer downloading/ripping and keeping MP3s locally.
  14. Mainly still YouTube, but through Revanced where possible. One of the biggest gaps in other viable services right now.
  15. AuthPass cross platform. Using the same format as KeePass, but I prefer their client.
  16. Mullvad /AdGuard DNS on my phone, Cloudflare on desktop / Whatever my partner currently has set up on the network now plus my own firewalld configuration at home
  17. Mostly stock GrapheneOS
  18. F-Droid / Aurora / (Sandboxed) Play Store only where the others won't do it.
  19. Still need to get the archive away from Google. Considering just organizing locally with Immich, just doing local backups for a couple years now.
  20. DMI / Vädret apps (more useful locally), KDE's built-in weather widget on desktop.
  21. We avoid "smart" anything in this house. The closest is Xiaomi's (Graphene sandboxes) app handling the robovac.
  22. It's not Google specific, but I have personally been leaning toward FOSS software storing data locally wherever I reasonably can.
[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 2 points 2 months ago

Also early 2000s here, but I was in my late 20s by then. Started out on Debian not that long before Woody came out, then before too long I tried Mandrake alongside it.

Exciting stuff for someone who first set hands (and started into BASIC) on a TRS-80, and then ran GEOS on a C64 for years. I was drawn to the opportunities for more tinkering, among other things.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.

I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA's repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html

That's what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.

My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It's aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.

Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you're not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.

But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn't really matter. That's mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm also in the Nordics (so accustomed to the overall electronics prices by now), and going to echo that their prices are looking kinda steep for what you're getting. Unless you're somehow extremely uncomfortable with picking up a refurb machine somewhere else, and installing whichever distro(s) you want on it yourself. That should be a simple enough process, maybe especially dealing with a Lenovo--and really on just about any laptop you can find, as compared to 20 years ago. Or probably even the 10 since you were last using it.

Just getting a refurb elsewhere and making an install USB is the way I would suggest going. If you use Ventoy to write it, you should be able to try several different live system options off the same stick before deciding which to go with for now.

That site did not seem to be actually specifying what distro they're installing for you, but their "Linux installation" service page (for the equivalent of $150US or €130+!) shows Mint and offers the option of several desktop flavors of Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. If you're happy to pay that kind of premium for someone else to spend maybe 15 minutes on likely a Mint install set up however they decided was best? Sure, it might be a decent way to go. Doesn't really seem necessary even for a complete beginner, however.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 1 points 2 months ago

I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond "Idk, about 20 years ago?").

Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 11 points 2 months ago

Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes--and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.

If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you'll probably want to make sure it's using the latest drivers from them--and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.

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