captain_aggravated

When I bought my laptop, I bought an accessory with it: A Dell-branded DisplayLink USB dock. It can drive up to two 1080p monitors through USB 3.0. Linux doesn't support it out of the box. I googled "displaylink linux driver," the first hit was DisplayLink's website offering a driver for Ubuntu. I clicked a button, a .zip downloaded, inside was a file called displaylink-driver-4.4.24.run. Right clicked, ran as root. Driver installed. Second monitor blinked on. I use a 3D printer slicer software called Simplify3D. This is a commercial product, I paid $150 for a 2-seat license. There's a Linux version. To download, I go to Simplify3D's website, log into the user account page, there's a Download tab, go to that tab, there's a big green Download button. Here comes a .zip file with a .run installer in it. Run as root, it installs. *snip* Ever notice how the folks who complain the loudest about Linux are the ones who "REALLY want to use Linux, but I tried one distro for a few hours and just couldn't stand it." Three; the built-in monitor and two external displays, all running 1920x1080. I usually use two at my desk though; there's not a good place to leave my laptop open. Man I don't even. I'm gonna talk to some of my friends at Duke U and suggest they study the psychology of certain computer enthusiasts going bouncing banana ballsack bonkers every time Linux is mentioned. I made the comparison to taking a toddler's surprise egg videos away in another thread down in "everything not windows." I'm upgrading that from comparison to hypothesis. In Mint Cinnamon 18.3, right click the panel, click Add Applets to panel, click Download, and find CinnVIIStarkMenu. Mint 19.1 asks you on first startup if you'd like to use the Win7 or Win98 style. Personally, I'd like the Windows XP "each window gets its own button but we group like windows" behavior, but hey.

NO ONE has good customer service. Ever. In any industry.

I'm the other way. Never used an iPhone for longer than "Hey, could you take a picture of us real quick" but I just got an S10e. Size: It feels huge to me, mind you I upgraded from a 4.5" S4 mini. ALL phones are too large if you ask me, so being the smallest in the range is a feature to me, not a drawback. Display: I don't see any problems; it's bright, clear and rather large. It's non-curved, which make screen protectors easier to deal with. The hole punch is actually fun to play with; mine is the superlaser of the Death Star! Cameras: A significant improvement over my old phone. One fewer camera than the rest of the range. I would have preferred the 2x zoom over the panorama; I'm constantly taking detail pictures of projects to communicate with colleagues, but my old S4 was sufficient, so this is good enough too. Apps: Man I've got like five app stores right now, from Google Play to F-Droid. I'm swimming in software. I've only noticed one issue so far: The Roku controller app's widget bombs out. The app itself works fine. Being able to run things in full screen desktop mode with DeX is pretty cool too. Hardware goodies: I've got pansexual wireless charging, some wacky new Wi-Fi that no one has implemented yet, a multifunctional fingerprint reading power button, a remappable Bixby key, USB-C and a headphone socket. Samsung smartassery: Samsung Pay is accepted in places that don't take Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. You heard me. Battery life: EASILY gets me through a day and then some. I actually have to remind myself NOT to charge it. My main drawbacks: The UI is a little bit of a mess; you sort of have to guess what you can tap, long tap or slide. They kind of expect you to be used to Android at this point; I'm having less trouble with it than my father, who carried a flip phone up until last week. Bixby is useful except when she isn't. "Scan a QR code" brings up 1800-Flowers for some reason. Bixby Vision doesn't have a clue what it's doing; I pointed it at the little USB C to A adapter that came with the phone, and it mistook it for a bar of soap. The quick commands are fun and useful if you take the time to program them. The included wired earbuds are hot buttered garbage. Best thing about them is how well they fit in my trash can. Guess I'll just have to keep using my Bose headset. The battery isn't removable. ? No physical keyboard It hasn't cured cancer, ushered forth a post scarcity society or brought Firefly back into production. But it's only been out a week or so, let's give it time.

Switching to Linux is as easy or as hard as you make it. I inadvertently made the transition easy on myself because I bought a Raspberry Pi to use for ham radio, and I learned Linux as a hobby project. It came in handy when Windows 8.1 happened to me. Or, you can decide that you're gonna nuke every computer in the house and go without until you've got Gentoo up and running. Linux CAN be very lightweight. It can also be a big fat bastard like me. For example, Cinnamon aims to be full-featured and polished, while LXDE stands for "lightweight x desktop environment." Generally speaking, it will be lighter than Windows. As for whether you'll get better performance in applications because the OS itself is lighter, well, probably not. Games in particular aren't quite as well optimized for a Linux system usually, so if there's a compatibility layer like WINE or Vulkan, there's more total code running your game. That, and graphics drivers for Linux have like a millionth of the budget, so. However, Linux doesn't often decide to run heavy tasks in the background on its own the way Windows does. A Windows box will all but slam to a halt the instant it decides to run an update. That's just not the case in Linux. Linux is a little safer than Windows by a combination of factors: There are indeed fewer viruses being written for it. Don't count on this, because security by obscurity is not security. There are three main engineering characteristics that make Linux safer: It's open source, so anyone can examine the code for vulnerabilities. There's a user permissions system...you know how Windows started asking you to do things "as administrator" around 2007 or so? That's always been baked into Linux. Finally, there's the standard repos. Installing software from known and trusted repositories with security built-in makes you a lot less likely to get digital AIDS than running just whatever random .exe you find. THE USER CAN ROYALLY FUCK THIS UP! You can run Linux in profoundly unsafe ways. In the words of Bryan Lunduke, "I'm gonna run everything as root and see what happens." As for personal privacy and security, we can cover basically any level of paranoia. Most folks who go "Microsoft is collecting my user data? That's not very nice!" will be satisfied by basically any mainline distro. If you're really concerned with privacy, there are distros specifically for that. Purism builds (almost good) security-focused laptops that have things like hardware kill switches for the radios, mic and camera. They maintain a security-focused Debian fork called PureOS that does things like use duckduckgo by default and comes with a password manager pre-installed. Even farther down the rabbit hole is Tails. Tails is designed to run from a USB stick, leave no trace on any computer it's run on, ships with Tor and a bunch of encryption stuff, and by default it doesn't maintain any changes you made or files you saved when powered off. It's intended for "if the government catches me with this, they'll execute my family" sort of scenarios. THE USER CAN ROYALLY FUCK THIS UP! Boot up Linux, feeling nice and safe that no one's recording your data, log into Facebook... As for creating your own distro, it's again as easy or as hard as you want it to be. Someone looked at the Linux world before Arch existed and said "You know what? I wanna make Arch." Whole new distribution model, code base, package management, it's too much for one person, that took a community to do. On the other end of the spectrum is Hannah Montana Linux, which is just Kubuntu with pink eye, probably took one guy part of an afternoon. But, probably get to where you're answering rather than asking "is Linux more secure" before thinking about distributing your own version. ?

I started using Linux Mint in 2014, with version 17. I'm now using 18.3, and when it's time to shift again I'll probably head to Manjaro. I did briefly try Mint 19.1, and it just didn't work right for me. I don't know if I screwed something up or what, but lawd a lot of things didn't work right so I pulled back to 18.3. I haven't really had many issues with system stability. I have seen Cinnamon occasionally restart, usually because I did something stupid. I've never actually crashed the OS, I've never seen a kernel panic. There are a couple silly little issues. Sometimes my laptop will suspend when the lid is shut, then it'll wake itself back up four seconds later. A couple times I took the machine out of my bag after a long trip only to find it MIGHTY hot. If I'm going very far, I just shut it down now, it takes about 13 seconds to boot. I've seen much worse quirks out of WIndows machines. Windows boxen tend to slow down as they age, and I haven't seen that out of a Linux system. Stick with something fairly close to Ubuntu and go with whatever desktop environment you like. Since they're all built from Ubuntu, you'll find they have more similarities than differences, particularly in available software. Speaking of available software, this forum post is brought to you by APT I personally haven't had much of a problem with gaming, though my tastes just happen to have aligned with the availability of Linux-ready titles. There are several rants here that I will omit, suffice it to say my beloved indie games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Kerbal Space Program, Antichamber and Undertale run perfectly in Linux in my experience. There are others on this forum who'll insist I'm insane...As an aside, have you ever seen a toddler addicted to those surprise egg videos on Youtube, and tried to take their tablet away, and they just SCREAM? Some of the folks here remind me of that when talking about gaming on Linux; they can't get Call of Halo, Assassin's Redemption 2: Revisionism running on their first try and oh they'll put even MY bitching to shame. If I were a betting man, I'd put money down that your experience would be somewhere in between my experience and theirs. I'll also note that due to the nature of Wine and DOSbox, it may be actually easier to run retro games on a Linux machine than modern Windows. Watching movies is straightforward. Amazon Prime Video, Netflix etc. pretty much all work in Chrome. NOT Chromium, Chrome. You need the Google extensions, but it will install and run. VLC will also happily play DVD movies, assuming you're a Victorian luddite like me who still owns a functioning optical drive. By the way, use VLC. Doesn't matter what OS you run, VLC is excellent. Graphic design on Linux is a total diaper fire. No Adobe products. Instead of Photoshop, you've got GIMP. GIMP, to its credit, is capable of accomplishing basically everything Photoshop can, but the UI is nigh incomprehensible. I use GIMP at work to prepare raster images for laser etching; for this I need the rescale, zealous crop, desaturate and remove alpha channel functions. Any time I try to get basically anything else done with it, I end up needing to get drunk. Inkscape is a little less stupid, it's your Illustrator replacement. I have actually gotten things done in Inkscape, but it always involves googling. In deference to wasab, I think Inkscape is at Version 0.92 right now. Doesn't help that I'm more of a CAD guy, and those silly artists seem to think that lines are supposed to have width. ? Krita is a straight-up drawing program. I'm not good at straight-up drawing, so I have no opinion, but I have actually seen some people who are good at straight-up drawing enjoy Krita. All three of the above packages are available on Windows, so maybe try them before you trap yourself with them. Note: My personal favorite image manipulation tool is a terminal utility called Imagemagick. Yes, I photoshop in the command line. It's too late for me, now. That, we can HANDLE. All of your common desktop environments are going to be very customizable. gnome-look.org is a good place to start, the themes, icon packs, desktop wallpapers etc. all number in the hundreds or thousands. Google "ricing linux" if you feel like falling down a particularly deep rabbit hole.

Are you planning to stream games, or just a video feed?

I would try to keep my phone dry even if I knew the seal was intact.

If you want a Windows-lke desktop experience, probably not mainline Ubuntu. Gnome is a lot closer to MacOS than Windows. Mint Cinnamon edition and Kubuntu are more Windows 7 like, Ubuntu Mate or Xubuntu will feel a bit more "classic" than that. My usual advice, don't get married to your first distro. They're free, download a bunch of them and try them out.

There's no replacing going on, you will have a /home directory. It is indeed where the Documents, Pictures etc. directories live. /home is the equivalent to C:\Users on a Windows system. The Mint installer gives you the option to give that directory it's own separate partition. From that question, I'm assuming that you're used to Windows and haven't used a Unix file system before. A brief orientation: In Windows, each logical partition gets it's own drive letter, and each drive letter has its own tree structure. In Unix, there is one, and only one tree structure. It has one trunk, and that's /. All other directories on the system are branches (of branches, of branches...) of /. When you attach a drive to the system, the partitions on that drive are mounted to locations on that tree structure. I believe the Mint installer gives you the option to set /home, /opt, maybe even /var on their own partitions. That's optional; If you don't do this, they'll just be created as directories within the same partition as /. The physical drives themselves and their partitions are represented as files* in /dev, a drive might have a name like sda or sdb, and partitions on them are usually named like sda1 or sda2. Removable drives like USB flash drives should automatically mount in /media/username/drivename. It doesn't have to, though, you could choose to put them...anywhere. The Unix file system is more abstract, so virtual space doesn't necessarily resemble the physical layout of data. Most of the time, it doesn't need to. That's a quick and incomplete explanation, there are lots of great videos on Youtube about it, I recommend watching them. *Everything in Unix is a file. Everything. From the hard drive to the keyboard to the display to the network adapter to other computers on the network, everything is treated as a file.

Well look, my general MO is to say "try it, see if it'll work for you, if it doesn't, fine, use Windows, if it does, use Linux." Doing nothing but steering people away ain't going to help anything.

Desktop Linux does very few things truly well. The real killer PC apps, 3D CAD, the Adobe creative suite, and gaming, largely don't support Linux. Basic desktop stuff like web browsing, email, Youtube, and Office work great in Linux, so the people with next to no computer needs would be well served in Linux. And many of them are...via ChromeOS. The rest won't bother uninstalling Windows. Creative or engineering power users really and truly are stuck, because GIMP, kdenlive and FreeCAD are not worthy replacements for Photoshop, Premiere and Solidworks, and they never will be. Linux is a viable programming and electronics engineering platform, what with all the Unix. Gaming is the one place where I see the market share actually start to increase. Unlike other segments, there's a major corporation pushing for improvements in Linux. Valve has been working hard on it and they've got a lot done. Also, gamers are capable of playing Hitman instead of Assassin's Creed. That's a thing that reality contains. I would suggest representing the Linux experience as worthy for those with the early adopter spirit. Otherwise we might as well go ahead and burn it down now because no one wants to improve it anywhere else.

You will have to create at least one partition. That partition can span the entire drive, and / (root) will be mounted on it. /home will be part of /root, and you won't have a swap partition. There's a debate as to whether to use an SSD for swap because of the write cycle limitation, I do have a swap partition on mine to enable hibernating and for the occasional overrun, but I seldom overrun my 16GB of RAM. Benefits of having a separate /home partition on a 1-drive install: You can encrypt the whole partition in addition to files/directories in that partition. If you reinstall/change the OS, you can surgically nuke / and leave /home standing, so you aren't forced to restore from backup. If you accidentally bork the file root file system, your /home FS may have survived. Benefits of one big partition: Avoids the "cannot install or update, / is full" nonsense. With one big partition, data just sloshes into whatever empty corner it needs. Less complicated. If you're going to just install an OS and then use it normally for years the way you might with Windows, it's the kind of decision you'll forget you made. The real power is that you can mount /home and swap on an HDD and / on an SSD if you've got the space for all the drives, but that's really a tangent.

Okay, here are my recommendations on how to switch from Windows to Linux with a focus on gaming, without outright warning you off. Go through your Steam library, look at the games that are most important to you, look at their store pages at where the Windows and Apple icons appear. If there's also a Steam logo there, it'll be Linux compatible. In my case, it just so happened that basically all of my games lined up with Linux availability. Climbing up onto a soapbox for a minute, many of the games that aren't available for Linux are made by the same developers that have major controversies surrounding lootboxes, predatory pricing schemes, or workers rights, the sort of studios that I don't want to support anyway, so it's no loss to me. *steps down off of soapbox* If you really are all about Ubisoft, EA and their ilk, you will be required to do some l33t hax0rzing, but with Valve's big push with things like SteamOS and Vulkan, it's coming right along. Start familiarizing yourself with Linux. Run it in a VM, install it on alternate hardware, get a Raspberry Pi, something. Do some of your "normal" daily tasks on a Linux machine, browse Reddit, edit Office documents, do what you do. Get used to the different file system, the UI. Do some stuff in the terminal. Get into the swing of owning and maintaining a Linux system. It is different. Take a good, critical look at your hardware and assess its Linux viability. The big sticking point these days is graphics drivers, particularly on laptops, and it's not usually the GPUs/drivers themselves, it's the donkey-fisting multiplexers. On laptops, you usually have one, maybe two outputs for video, they're physically attached to the CPU. There has to be some way of switching the outputs to the GPU or passing graphics back through the CPU and then to the IO. This is has been implemented 9 ways from Sunday depending on the brand and age of your GPU, and none of them are confidence inspiring. Switchable hybrid graphics is something I've wholly abandoned as "has never, and will never be worth it" like construction adhesives, politics, hydrogen fuel cells and marriage. A desktop system where the graphics card has it's very own outputs is where it's at, though I'll also note I'm astonished what Intel Integrated graphics can accomplish. sudo apt install steam. See how it works. There is a guy on Youtube, channel name DistroTube, who has posited that Linux gaming is on life support, and that life support is Steam. Few others want to support it, with one developer listing the hierarchy of revenue from most to least is Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS, interest from various bank accounts, and then Linux sales. There's a sort of Catch 22 with Linux systems here: No one uses Linux because there aren't many games and the graphics drivers suck, so devs don't develop games and drivers for Linux, etc. What I'm seeing is a LOT of people going "Hey, you know, Windows is doing things I really don't like, I'd really like to abandon it for another system, what about Linux?" And then getting warned off because it's not quite there yet. Well, the more Linux market share grows, the more incentive hardware manufacturers, software developers and game studios will have to support it. I won't represent Linux gaming as perfect or even just as good, but hell, give it a try anyway.

There are certainly Linux distros that are a LOT lighter in terms of RAM and processor threads compared to Windows, but double check they'll run the software you want, and that you're willing to live with them. That's why I suggested trying some out.

That is to say, it is case sensitive. ls d* searches for files that begin with a lowercase d, ls D* for files with an uppercase D. ls | grep -i d* will ignore case.