f00f/eris

It’s very new. Previously the system would just drop to a console with a message saying “Kernel panic: not syncing: [reason]” and a whole bunch of debug info.

But still, on a well-maintained system, that pretty much never happens. Mainly because Linux is significantly more resilient to faults in device drivers than Windows.

Yeah, 50% (ram / 2) seems about right.

The major tradeoff with zRAM is that programs are much more likely to crash due to running out of memory, but will run faster when memory is running low and freezes are less likely. You can think of it as offloading the pressure that traditional swap puts onto your disk, onto the (much faster) CPU. There will be an impact on CPU usage, but not enough to cause noticeable slowdown; in my experience running Linux, the CPU is almost never the reason something is slow, and is only going to be under significant pressure if you’re running a 3D game in software rendering, compiling a large program, or another complex CPU-bound task.

I wouldn’t recommend making the switch unless you often encounter system freezes or slowness while running tasks that use a lot of RAM (like web browsing on certain sites, or gaming), but it will improve things in that case.

You can install an antivirus, but you really don’t need to. Malware for Linux is rare, and malware that targets desktop Linux users is extremely rare (to the point that it’s a newsworthy story every time it does appear). Most distros have ClamAV and the frontend ClamTk in their repos, but it’s primarily used to scan servers for Windows malware before it reaches its intended target. Some Windows malware can still be harmful if run with Wine/Proton, but unless you’re downloading and running a lot of Windows software from unofficial sources (which you shouldn’t have any reason to) that won’t be a risk.

I’m using an AMD Ryzen iGPU on Wayland. I switched to Testing because the support already existed, but the kernel and mesa versions in stable were buggy for my particular GPU and I didn’t want to make a FrankenDebian.

It’s not systemd’s fault, though systemd most often implements offline updates. The arguments for and against offline updates have nothing to do with systemd.

A lot of Linux distros, and graphical package managers like Discover and GNOME Software, are moving in that direction, under the argument that updating while online can cause disruptions to running software, in the worst case including the package manager itself (which can brick the system if it occurs in the middle of a critical update), and updates can’t be applied until the affected program (or the system, in case of critical components like the kernel) restarts anyway. Fedora Magazine explains the reasoning here: https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

In my personal experience though, I have never had an issue enabling automatic online updates on Debian Stable, and have had computers stay online for several months without any noticeable issues beyond Firefox restarting, so the risk is there but it’s pretty minor.

I personally don’t use Arch, but I think the reason so many people find it stable in practice is because they know their system well. When something breaks or needs to be changed, they know which configuration file to edit, which package to {un,re,}install, what to look for in the AUR, etc., and they can usually avoid those things in the first place, because they went through a fairly hands-on install process, not to mention having the best Linux wiki in existence at their disposal.

On top of that, I think a lot of derivatives of Debian, including Ubuntu and all its derivatives, severely undermine their stability by providing custom configurations for or changes to software that are rarely documented and completely transparent to the user… until they break and leave no indication of how to fix them. Which is one reason why I ended up using base Debian.

For me, the outdated packages in stable have actually gotten better over time, as DEs get closer to a place where I don’t need any major updates to enjoy using them, Flatpaks become more readily available, and on a subjective level, I get less and less invested in current Linux news. Before Debian became my “forever distro”, I’d hopped to it a few times, and often found myself wishing for a newer piece of software that wasn’t in backports or flathub, or simply being bored with how stable it is, but that’s been happening less and less. And I feel like Debian 12 in particular left me with software that I wouldn’t mind being stuck with for two years.

I’ve gotten warnings to upgrade my browser with Debian’s Firefox ESR, but they never affected a website’s usability in a way that a newer version would fix, and they do provide security updates and new ESR series when they come out; even if you must have the newest Firefox, you can use the Flatpak.

Additionally, I’m currently on testing in order to get better support for my GPU, and each time I’ve tried to use it, it’s worked for me for a longer time than the last as I get better at resolving or avoiding broken packages. If you do experience issues like the one you described, and can replicate them, and no one else has already reported them, you should report them to Debian’s bug tracker. The whole point of Testing is to find and squash all the critical bugs before the next stable releases.

how do I install programs from outside the “discover store”? I can get the Plex app through the built in app store, but the Plex media server app isn’t on there so I have to download it from the website, which gives me a .rpm file.

Installing from Discover (or to be more precise, your distribution’s software repositories, for which Discover is a frontend) is usually best practice. Programs you find online are less likely to work on your distro (especially something as technologically unusual as Bazzite). That said, from what I could find online the command to install an RPM file on that distro is sudo rpm-ostree install <path/to/package.rpm>. I have never used boxbuddy or any kind of distro container, but I imagine it would as simple as opening the terminal for one of your distros and entering the appropriate command for that distro to install your package.

Also, outside of the built in discover store, what’s the best way to install programs?

Generally, Flatpak packages are safe to install, and any Flatpak repos you enable will show up in Discover. Flathub contains the majority of Flatpak packages in existence, though it might be enabled by default on Bazzite.

What are some cool programs in general to check out? My main use case is gaming, I don’t program or do any work on my PC but I’d like to explore just for the sake of exploring!

Just look around in Discover and you’ll find lots of gems. As a retro gamer, I’ve found RetroArch indispensable, as a frontend for all my emulators and then some. Lutris is nice if you want all of your games to be centralized under one launcher. There are lots of fun time-wasting open-source games too.

Also, what’s a good way to familiarize myself with using the terminal? I’ve used the terminal on Windows quite a bit in the past, but only for basic things like unlocking a bootloader on Android and sending a ROM to it, back when I cared enough to root my phones. How would I, for example, pull a program off of github and compile it myself if needed? There’s a program on github called gHub GUI by ysph that I’d like to check out, would be nice to be able to configure my mouse since piper doesn’t seem to recognize my mouse.

You can just ease into it, or read any number of Linux courses online. Following tutorials on Linux will be as easy as following tutorials on Windows. You can learn about programs with either man <command>, info <command>, or <command> --help.

Most projects include README files instructing you on how to compile and/or install them; the exact process depends on the program. But generally, if you see files named “configure” and “Makefile”, the process is to install dependencies, then cd into the source code folder and run ./configure; make; sudo make install.

What are some general best practices that differ from Windows? I don’t really know how to narrow this question down, apologies for it being so vague.

Discover should be the first place you go to install programs. Don’t install programs from random websites unless you absolutely have to. They probably won’t work.

A lot of the programs you are used to from Windows will not be available for Linux. They might be compatible with Wine or Proton, but try to find alternatives to them before you try that. There is a KDE app and a GNOME app for most of the basic uses, and https://alternativeto.net/ is a decent resource for finding Linux-friendly alternatives to just about anything.

You probably don’t need an antivirus - there are viruses for Linux, but they are extremely rare, and the anti-malware programs that are available for Linux will only detect and remove Windows viruses.

Don’t have any comments on your other issues, because I don’t have experience with the software you’re using (I rarely if ever buy “gaming” hardware).

Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won’t be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function

Debian! It’s stable, elegant, and doesn’t impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.

I’d be interested to try VanillaOS or another “immutable” distro at some point in the future. See if they’ve matured enough for my day-to-day use.

First, go to [three dots] -> Preferences -> Runners -> Proton, click the button next to the newest available version of Proton GE (currently ge-proton-9-7), and wait for it to download.

Then, go to your bottle -> Settings -> Runner, set the runner to ge-proton-[version], and wait for Bottles to configure the new runner.

Have you tried using different runners? According to ProtonDB Ape Out is completely supported by Proton, so maybe try a Proton runner instead of Wine.

Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.

It might not be Wayland-related at all.

I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I’m assuming it’s normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the “Automatic” pick works.

If it doesn’t work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.

My second distro was Debian 8, initially with LXDE (which has barely changed at all since then, so it’s still nostalgic) then later switching to KDE Plasma 4. I probably hold the most nostalgia for it, even more than I do for my first distro (Linux Mint 17). For a while I was into Plasma Netbook, which I find to be an especially weird, nostalgic product of its time, and the Oxygen theme in general is probably my favorite default look for any DE.

I’m working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn’t happening anymore. I haven’t been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.

There isn’t an alsa command on my system either, so that’s no surprise. But we’ll need more information to track down the cause, such as:

• What (sound) hardware are you using? (try lspci | grep Audio)
• What happens when you try to play a sound? Does it get stuck loading / at 0:00, show an error, or just play silently?
• Is your system using pulseaudio directly, or via pipewire? (try pactl info)
• What shows up in pavucontrol? (Is it detecting your speaker, or just “dummy output”? Is sound muted, and can you unmute?) Try also alsamixer.
• If you installed non-free firmware, you should have a few lines like deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.

Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I’ve had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.

1. I believe there is still an issue with Windows deleting Linux bootloaders during some updates. You’ll be fine if you install Linux on a separate disk, and even if you dual-boot on one disk and the bootloader gets deleted, there are ways to recover it. You don’t strictly need to have separate data and OS partitions, and I’ve gone back and forth on whether I prefer it - it makes distro hopping and disk encryption easier, at the cost of potentially inefficient use of space and serious consequences if your OS partition fills up.
2. Disk encryption is very straightforward if you use separate OS and data partitions. You literally just tick a box during the install and enter an extra password. It won’t upset Windows any more than a normal install does (i.e. Windows might think it’s corrupted, but won’t do anything without your input). With one partition for everything, it’s still possible, but the encryption will be much weaker and handled by the bootloader in a somewhat clunkier way, and I’m not sure if Mint even supports that setup.
3. I don’t have much experience with this myself, and certainly not on Linux Mint, so I’ll leave this one to other commenters.
4. Synaptic is just a fancy frontend to APT, and I think Mint also has something called mintInstall, which was just an apt frontend back when I used it, but I think it also supports Flatpak now. It’s entirely up to personal preference as to which UI you prefer. I do recommend you set up Flathub if it’s not there by default, as it gives you access to a ton of useful apps that can’t be packaged by Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint for various reasons.
5. Don’t download software from random websites unless it’s absolutely necessary. Chances are, their version either won’t work well, if at all, or will break your system. Try APT first, Flatpak second, everything else is a last resort option. If a program you used on Windows doesn’t have a (working, native) Linux version, try finding and learning to use an alternative that is in the APT repositories before downloading the Windows version and using it on Wine. Back up your most important files from Windows before installing Linux in dual boot, just in case you make a mistake somewhere. To answer the last question, stick to the default terminal emulator and Firefox installation unless there’s a feature you really want in another one; the distro’s developers picked them for a reason, after all.