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.......

[vtsteam]

Presently using EasyOS, Barry Kauler's latest, based on Devuan Excalibur. Very happy with it.

If you want to try it, Barry has a simple installer called EasyDD which will write an image file of EasyOS to a USB thumbdrive. That will be a fully operational live build, not requiring installation to HD. Runs fine that way.

Of course a quality thumbdrive will start up noticeably faster and better than a bargain basement one. Actually, during the initial write installation it will tell you just how fast your usb drive is, comparatively.

EasyOS has containers so you can run stuff in sandboxes if you want. And it encrypts your data files and any customizations or applications you add. It does come with a large number of apps already, but is only about 1 gig in size. It runs in RAM so is very fast. It has an easy upgrade button, and also takes snapshots of your system, if desired so you can return to an earlier state.

Frankly, the best Linux OS I've tried re. small size and efficiency for a DIY type. I like it anyway.

[sorveltaja]

Yeah I'll probably test EasyOs at some point. But as the media is in .img format, running it in Virtualbox or Qemu isn't that straightforward.

Some gripes about Mate:

First hiccup - In both Debian and Mint versions, there's an old Gnome 2 bug:

When app shortcuts are placed to panel, their order changes after reboot, even if they are locked. Same can happen with system tray elements (volume indicator, network and clock/date). One possible solution is to place the app icons to the left end of the panel. After a few reboots, the icons are where I put them.

Another is that I've not been able to completely disable power management features. The screen still goes off after 10 minutes, if there's no activity.
Only setting screensaver timing to max (2 hours) seems to postpone that.

General things about Linux:

Distros that I've tested so far, if there's on one desktop environment (DE) (in this case Xfce) an app such as file manager (PcmanFm which requires something like catfish to be installed to search files), that one would like to replace with other like Caja, it's next to impossible to set that preferred file manager as a default. That's one of the reasons why I hopped to Mate.

And when considering installing other 'system' apps, they may well drag whole DE with them, so it's worth looking at what kind of dependencies they may have, if one attempts to make a light weight installation for an old hardware.

Some pros and cons of what I've discovered, when using minimal Debian Mate install:

+ light on resources
+ it's possible to choose a simple, or 'retro' style interface, instead of overly polished or 'modern' ones
+ as it's based on a server distro, out of the box there are much less apps that one might never use anyway
+ some Mate versions have task (or whatever) bar on both top and bottom sides - what a waste of space, but it's easy to just delete one of them. The way I've done it is to remove bottom one, and move top one which has systray items to bottom.  More details perhaps later.   

- Mate may not be as frequently maintained as more popular DE's
- without having fancy software center, installing certain apps like Wine requires extra, distro specific steps. Also, when trying to install apps from .deb packages, there will likely be errors - I haven't looked yet what are the prerequisites to avoid such errors
- certainly not very newbie friendly - one has to go 'under the hood', and get used to searching information about whatever tasks one wants to perform

Mint Mate, on the other hand, has more GUI tools already in it, making it somewhat easier option to get familiar with Mate. 

[vtsteam]

Yeah I'll probably test EasyOs at some point. But as the media is in .img format, running it in Virtualbox or Qemu isn't that straightforward.

Sorveltaja do you have to run it in a VM? You can run it off of the thumbdrive if your OS will boot to one. EasyOS is designed to easily run from USB drive. Write the image file to thumbdrive via DD or whatever imaging software you have. Then boot to the thumbdrive.

Latest version is EasyOS Excalibur 7.0.34.

[sorveltaja]

In the past I've used Puppy live, mainly for editing/deleting files in Win10 installation, but never quite got used to it. As EasyOs is based on Puppy, it would need some modifications to work more like 'beginner friendly' distros.

It's not about Puppy or EasyOs themselves, but the way I'm used to certain patterns - in other words, what I'm familiar with.

As I come from Windows world, possible transition at this point seems to be easier, when using 'windowsy' DE's. I guess old habits die hard.

[sorveltaja]

Some more thoughts:

A new user, when testing otherwise well running distros like Pop Os, Ubuntu or Linux Mint, might find their software centers to be rather sluggish.  Because of that, they are quite frustrating to use. They may give an impression that Linux as a whole is just that slow with about anything.

An example: when I started with Linux back in spring of this year, I used Pop Os's Pop Shop to see what apps there are available to possibly replace ones I've used in Windows. It was good thing to use at the very beginning to install/remove apps, but for some time now, I've avoided using it.

What are the alternatives for such software centers?

One is Synaptic, which has rather basic interface, but still a GUI. It doesn't necessarily come installed by default on mentioned distros. It can be installed using said software center, or using command 'sudo apt install synaptic' in terminal.

One thing, when using command line to install an app, it's fast, but the user must know the exact name of the package he wants to install.

That's where software center can be used to find app names (by category or so), and further, if needed, to look on the net for more info about that app.

Small and capital letters matter; if one tries to install Synaptic instead of synaptic in terminal, there's an error 'Unable to locate package Synaptic'.

Change of gears: when trying Linux on my laptop, screen is always too bright. To tame it a bit, I've used command 'xgamma -gamma 0.5' to adjust contrast. That can be added as a startup application on control center or similar.

Unfortunately, even if the distro has brightness control in display options, it may not work at all.  To enable brightess control (Fn + right and left arrow on Acer) an entry in a grub file (assuming grub is used) needs to be edited. But files like that can't be modified without admin or root privileges.

One way to do that is to use nano, a terminal text editor with command 'sudo nano /etc/default/grub', and add 'acpi_osi=' entry, so that it looks similar to this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi="
 
After doing that, grub needs to be updated with command 'sudo update-grub' and reboot to apply changes.

Nano's basic commands are: ctrl+o (and enter) to save the file, and ctrl+x (and enter) to exit to get back to terminal.

So no doubt, there are still things that may require the use of terminal. That's one of the things that has kept me from using Linux before, as some of the tasks can't be done using GUI, like on Windows. More savvy users might claim that the users can modify Linux to look and work just as they prefer. It's true, but only if that user knows what to do.

Bit of a rant - there are a lot of sites on the net offering solutions to this or that issue, that newbies face. Some of them are plain hostile, having flame wars about everything. Just don't engage; let them be the way they are, and move on. That's an unfortunate part, as many know, of searching information in these days.

But enough of that. Learning basic terminal commands can help to get a better picture of what's involved in editing settings in Linux. There's no need to go crazy about it. Not everyone wants or needs to be a hacker. At least I don't.

Foolproof way of doing the testing is to use VM like Virtualbox - it's free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. If one breaks the system inside VM (I've done that many times), it stays there, without affecting the host system.

In the end, I have Pop and Win7 installed on my pc, but without dual boot option. That's because I disconnected Win7 disk before installing Pop on a separate disk. Of course, that might not be handy or convenient, but when I want to boot to Win7, I just restart the pc and press F11 key and select the disk containing Win7. No dualboot issues whatsoever.     

[AdeV]

To enable brightess control (Fn + right and left arrow on Acer) an entry in a grub file (assuming grub is used) needs to be edited. But files like that can't be modified without admin or root privileges.

Interestingly, I've never had that issue; and whilst I've pretty much stuck with Linux Mint ever since Ubuntu went all weird looking, I've run it on maybe 4 different laptops now (two Thinkpads, one of unknown manufacture that's actually my official work-supplied device, and one I can't recall now) and the brightness (and volume) buttons all worked out of the box.  Obviously I can't speak for other distros. One of the two Thinkpads ended up with Linux Lite on it (because it was a feeble Celeron monstrosity), honestly can't recall if the brightness buttons ever worked with that - it was my "IMDB" box that I used when watching TV & wanted to look up an actor or somesuch.

WRT software - yeah, that is something which seems less polished than Windows. For the most part, installing stuff on windows (prior to v10 anyway) was pretty well painless. OK, getting it to actually function AFTER installation was sometimes "entertaining"; with Linux it seems the opposite is true: Sometimes it's a bear to get something installed; but once installed it usually functions just fine. Being a software dev who started in the era when windows was a DOS program, I'm comfortable just using apt on the command line. And when it comes to finding apps, I usually end up searching the Web for something to do what I want, and once I find it that's usually got the apt instructions (or alternatives. AppImage is pretty good, although I have found a couple of those which don't work properly).

Foolproof way of doing the testing is to use VM like Virtualbox - it's free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. If one breaks the system inside VM (I've done that many times), it stays there, without affecting the host system.

Fun anecdote: about 10 years ago now, that's how I ran Windows in my day job: Linux PC running VMWare (VirtualBox didn't support USB back then) with the guest OS running Windows. I also used to have a couple of Linux VMs also running at the same time, because the client software we used was supplied as a Linux-based CD image. So... I'd basically "burn" one of the VMs with the CD Image & boot it up, which meant I didn't need to use any dedicated hardware.  Except... one day, I somehow managed to burn the install to my main PC! Weirdly, Windows kept running OK for a while, but then things started to get a bit iffy, with random crashes and other glitching. So I rebooted everything and BANG! Byebye PC. Had to re-install everything from scratch. NOT ideal.  Had I done the same thing to a Windows PC, of course, it would have spat the dummy instantly, instead of lulling me into a false sense of security by continuing to run for a while!

[vtsteam]

I hate synaptics and apt for a number of functional reasons, sudo as well. I'm telling you guys, try EasyOS. It has a package manager that will handle .debs, appimages, flatpaks, .sfs files, and many puppy .pets.

If you ever ran win98, this isn't much different in simple desktop interface. Menu in lower left. Big number of already installed programs. Encryption right out of the box. This thing will runs circles in speed around any of the big Linuxes. You can run it off of a thumbdrive permanently, not just as a test OS. And that can be run in a number of different computers. It's faster yes if installed on HD, but definitely not required. And it will run on older equipment.

It also features containers if you want to do development.

[sorveltaja]

I hate synaptics and apt for a number of functional reasons, sudo as well.

How does that help new Linux users?

Again, as many of us know, Linux discussions can and probably will get pretty heated. I certainly hope that it doesn't have to happen here, on this forum.

The aim of this thread is to provide info written by me, a noob Linux user, to other noob Linux users reading this thread (if any).

I could go on and on about these off-topic subjects - but no, it has to end right here.

[Joules]

I have run Linux systems on and off for 30yrs plus.   However the Win 11 debacle has cemented my uptake of Linux for both the wife and myself as our go to desktop machines.   She is coming from Mac's so vaguely Linux like and more familiar to her than Microsoft OS's.

I have also moved our desktop machines to using Raspberry Pi's  Pi 4, 5, 400, 500 and 500+ for the wife as she wanted a mechanical keyboard.    These are excellent solutions as there is a healthy community supporting them with lots on online help and video tutorials online.  In my opinion this is one of the best ways to cheaply migrate to Linux, can't fault Pi OS.

I have also just started to play with RISC-V on Pi Zero 2W.   A very minimalist setup with many programming options and reasonable support.  RISC-V the code is very compact and simple for doing hardware related interfacing.  Using BBC Basic is generally my go to, as a programmer I am not.

                 Just my experience from the last few years hunting cheap low power solutions that don't involve 2nd hand PC's.

[vtsteam]

I hate synaptics and apt for a number of functional reasons, sudo as well.

How does that help new Linux users?

Again, as many of us know, Linux discussions can and probably will get pretty heated. I certainly hope that it doesn't have to happen here, on this forum.

The aim of this thread is to provide info written by me, a noob Linux user, to other noob Linux users reading this thread (if any).

I could go on and on about these off-topic subjects - but no, it has to end right here.

No offense meant by that. Just my personal take on those particular ways of loading programs. I don't see that it hurts anyone, and others may like them. To me, and I've show several newbies how to use Linux, those particular aspects are counterproductive. Newbies generally do not want to drop to console to add a program. Apt requires console work with a number of unfamiliar and ambiguous commands, such as update/upgrade remove/purge, etc.

Synaptic, is supposed to make this into an automated, more graphically oriented process, which would be great if it worked the way it is supposed to. But it has many problems. For instance try installing Wine with it. It will pull in many dependencies to do that. Then uninstall it immediately afterwards. It will not uninstall those most of those dependencies. This kind of thing eventually bloats a user's system. There are many other problems with Synaptic installations, which require a new user to go to apt to and console to make the program they want work.

Su and sudo, is for most people I've introduced to Linux, another point of confusion. At first they cannot understand why they do not have permission to do the things they want to do. While Linux, like Unix, was designed as a multi-user system, where a root administrator, and lesser permissioned users was a necessary practicality, most home computers are single user systems. Since now with sudo, anyone can override their permissions restrictions anyway, I personally prefer not to have to type that in.

EasyOS is just a personal preference for me, and I'm fine if others want to use any other Linux system, or even Windows or Mac OS's. To each their own. But there's nothing wrong, I think, in pointing out what one's personal likes and dislikes are, and the reasons for them, and I think those do not prevent newbies from trying Linux of any species.

I hope my comments are taken in the spirit meant -- not as a discouragement to anyone.