Experiences, thoughts and rants about using Linux as a newbie after Windows

[sorveltaja]

I've been using Pop Os for a few months, and quite like it as a step to see how things work in Linux world. 

I've also looked for a lighter distro for my 2011 laptop to replace Win7. Yes, there are plenty of them, but still, they tend to include way too much stuff, that I'll never use.

Make a custom Linux iso then? Meh, I tried that using Cubic, but don't know how much can be removed until something breaks. Dependencies I guess.

How about even lighter distro, where it's possible to install only needed apps?

Lately I've been testing server versions of Ubuntu and Debian in VM. In other words, 'headless' ones that doesn't have elements like desktop (or actually anything that uses GUI) as a default.

Anyway, there are tech guys on Youtube, who show the steps how to make a minimal Linux installation with desktop using server distro.

What comes to desktop environments, I've tried Xfce, Lxqt, and Mate.

At this point, Mate seems to be the closest to what I'm looking for, for its lightness and customization options. It even allows using window borders in its themes without the need to mess with css files. An example of classic Window-ish GUI:

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Ubuntu Mate uses Snap (which is a service running at background) to install and handle apps like Firefox. Like with Windows, I don't like such unnecessary services hanging around, and Snapd is one of them. Obviously, disabling that breaks some things.   

Debian Mate doesn't seem to use Snap out of the box, so I'll stick to it for now. 

So, this is about finding out how usable, reliable and perhaps snappy such a minimal system can be, when compared to 'full' distros like Mint and Pop Os.

In the end, bit of a rant:

Pop Os that I use on my pc, is quite resource heavy. When having something like Virtualbox and two web browsers running, it occasionally freezes the host system, VM or both.

I have 8Gb of ram on my pc, and don't remember having that kind of issues with Win7. From what I've read, it's about different memory management/allocation. There probably isn't much that can be done about it, except adding more RAM.

Some points about the subject at https://wartimeconsigliere.substack.com/p/why-windows-is-superior-at-memory?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

[AdeV]

I used Linux Lite on one of my feebler laptops, which seemed to work quite well. It's based on Ubuntu, and uses Xfce as its default window manager (I assume you could use Mate, I never tried). My daily driver is Linux Mint - I use that on pretty much every machine I've got, and it works quite well - although I also get glitches with a heavy Windows 7 VM. I have 32GB of RAM, and give the VM 12GB, occasionally Cinnamon (the Mint window manager) has a bit of a fit when restoring the VM from minimised - sometimes it takes 2-3 goes before it actually restores smoothly.  TBH, I should probably put Windows on a physical machine... but I'm really trying to avoid that.

[sorveltaja]

Yeah, Windows has some pretty positive things in it, although MS appears to do anything and everything to bury them. But enough of that.

I've just installed previously mentioned Debian with Mate on my pc. After setting up theme and other basic stuff, I downloaded Unigine Heaven, an old 2009 benchmark.
It ran, but with artifacts and rather crappy performance (fps).

To get to the point, I figured out that I have to install Nvidia drivers. But it's not that simple thing to do, unless there are clear instructions.

For this distro/version (Debian 13), there is a tutorial at https://linuxconfig.org/debian-13-nvidia-driver-installation

I followed the instructions, and after some copy-pasting, the drivers installed properly.

Another round of benchmarking verified that with much better results. I just wonder, why does it have to be so complicated on Linux.

In fact, I'm writing this from that new installation. If there aren't any major glitches or hiccups, I think I'll continue to test this as an alternative to Pop Os.

[BillTodd]

Linux and NVIDIA have a strange relationship. I'm not sure why but there always seems to be issues with NVIDIA chip-sets and Linux installs .  The popular distros like Ubuntu seem to handle it a bit better than the others

I'm currently using kubuntu with an  AMD saffire GPU that at least works with most things . My previous NVIDIA card have some strange behavior with Wayland .

I have win11 on another drive and hate having to use it . Microsoft have really F'ed it up and I cant see it recovering - kids these days don't seem to be able to write solid working software and concentrate on wizz-bang  animation rather than operability .  And don't get me started about phones.......