I use Dvorak on Kubuntu btw.

That’s unfair to brain worms.

I think this is mostly just practical. Tainted kernels are more problematic for a variety of reasons these days (thinking about things like TPMs), so moving that stuff out of the kernel lets NVIDIA keep their proprietary drivers without sacrificing certain use cases.

I’m more interested in seeing NVIDIA hardware usable with mesa, which would be a much longer term project.

Dvorak Simplified Keyboard intensifies

Different keyboard layouts exist for various reasons. It’s not always a great idea to try to unify things like that.

One of the most important things to recognise before I start: Don’t try to make something permanent right now. None of this needs to be written in stone. Choose what’s going to be best for you right now and know that in a few weeks or months you might want to change it. With that in mind:

What do you want out of Linux right now? A development system? Are you looking to see what it would be like to move away from Windows? Something else?

Let’s start with the development system. Let’s say you’re comfortable on Windows and just want to do a few things that are easier or more convenient on Linux. In that case, you probably want Windows Subsystem for Linux. This will get you a bunch of things, including the ability to quickly and easily try out a bunch of distributions. Of course, this is going to be primarily a command line experience. You’re not going to get the “full experience” with a desktop environment, etc. But if you just “need Linux for a couple of things,” this is a great intro.

Next, let’s say you want to try Linux out, see what the desktop is like, etc. This is a great opportunity to try a virtual machine. You’ll have limitations (less hardware access, maybe not as smooth a desktop as if it were on the hardware directly), but it’s a great way to play with distributions, especially if you want to explore multiple distros. (I’ll get to distros below)

Got a distro you want and want to try it as your “main environment” for a while? Other folks have mentioned how to dual boot. Here, the most critical part in my opinion is to put your important data onto a third partition that’s easily accessible to both. On Linux, I’d suggest bind mounting directories from that partition in your home directory. If you want to wipe an OS later it’ll be a bit rough, but you can do it. You’ll just need to boot from a live USB to do it, and of course be very careful about what partitions you delete.

Now, for distros:

Everyone is going to recommend their pet distro, and to that end I recommend [REDACTED]. But! Here’s my actual guide for selecting a distro:

1. Got a friend who’s willing to spend a decent amount of time helping you? Go with whatever they suggest, at least for now. It’s okay if it’s not where you’ll be eventually. What they’re familiar with right now will speed up their ability to help you, which will speed up your learning. What they use may well not be where you end up and that’s okay. I do however have two exceptions to this: first, if they suggest Gentoo or NixOS as your intro distro, find someone else. Gentoo and NixOS are both fantastic, but they are very much not beginner distros. In 6 months or a year though, they might be something you want to play with if you’re interested in doing a deep dive into Linux. Second, have them with you while you’re doing the install. You want to be doing the install, but they should be there to guide you and answer questions.
2. Doing this on your own? Go with a beginner friendly distro. The main recommendations I have here are Ubuntu spins or Fedora spins. There may well be people who reply to my comment spewing hate about one or both of those recommendations, and while there’s controversy about both of these, at the end of the day they’re both great. (Conflict of interest declaration: I work for the company that makes one of those distros, and the other one is some of our biggest competition. I applied for this job in part because I thought that one of the things the community loves to hate about one of these was Great, Actually™, but I wanted to improve some of the things that I think are actually valid criticisms.)

If internet randoms tell you “X is garbage, don’t use it,” feel free to disregard them. Most Linux distros are great. They all have smart, dedicated people working on them, and they each have their own vision of how they want it done. These ideas conflict sometimes, but that’s okay.

And one final thing… Don’t fight against your distro’s way of doing something. At least not now. Most people telling you to do something that works against the distro are doing so for ideological, not practical, reasons. You don’t need to get involved in ideological wars - enjoy Linux for its positives.!

I thought one of the main advantages of sodium-ion batteries was price? Great for the applications you listed

2069

Some distro that uses the Ubuntu repos blocked users from even installing snapd manually without jumping through a bunch of manual hoops. It’s one thing to not preinstall it, but that reeked to me of exactly the “we know better than our users” attitude they were accusing Canonical of.

Some distro that uses the Ubuntu repos blocked users from even installing snapd manually without jumping through a bunch of manual hoops. It’s one thing to not preinstall it, but that reeked to me of exactly the “we know better than our users” attitude they were accusing Canonical of.

How about the maintainers blocking a package that’s included in the default repository for ideological reasons?

The problem isn’t that every gnome dev is bad - not by a long shot. The problem is that there are just enough gnome devs in just the right (wrong?) positions who have an “our way or the highway” philosophy that it causes problems not just for people trying to use GNOME, but for people (such as the Kate developers) who are trying to give their users a good experience.

And by being the default in so many distros, GNOME has enough clout that if they choose to abandon a standard, many people will change to whatever GNOME does, making their applications worse for people on other desktops.

In the end it’s not too dissimilar to the problems created by the dominance of Chromium and Windows. The biggest difference IMO is that Google are actually more conciliatory towards others than the GNOME team are in many cases. Which is kinda crazy given how much Google can throw their weight around on the web.

That’s a big waste of energy. Drop him in a volcano or something instead and send a scientific probe to the sun.

This raises further questions, since it seems his humanoid form is a facade provided by his magic powers. Do you get him in non-corporeal form, or do you get him like that episode where he became human?

Sounds a lot like Spur

Ewww WTF no!

Who even buys 2% milk?

Not to be confused with a miso-theist, who believes god exists as a form of soup.

Thank you! I had looked through settings for that and hadn’t been able to find it.

As long as you have polkit setup to work in terminal sessions, yes. This is pretty standard these days, though not particularly widely used.

Kinda feels like writing a script that implements the sudo CLI but calls pkexec would be an easier way to do it. Given that so many systems already come with both sudo and pkexec, do we really need yet another option?

I’m not on the systemd hate train by any means, but I don’t understand how this is any improvement over pkexec