NatalSep 29, 2023

Finally had enough of Windows. I'm packing up. I'm nervous!

https://lemmy.world/post/5961010

Finally had enough of Windows. I'm packing up. I'm nervous! - Lemmy.world

Hey! Today is the day. I finally got fed up with Windows booting up with an advert that I already had yesterday and had clicked on “remind me in three days” reluctantly. I’m finally tired of killing Telemetry. Now that gaming is less important for me, I feel like now is a good time to switch mainly to Linux. I might keep a small spare drive with a Windows/Steam partition for the occasional incompatible game. I’ve just started transferring my precious files to an external drive and I’m preparing for my Exodus. Still unsure about the distro I’ll choose, I would like to avoid distro hoping. But now I made up my mind, I’m leaving windows for the foreseable future. I started self-hosting three months ago as a way to trialing Linux with the added bonus of being useful and my server is still up and alive so I’m confident I can use Linux without breaking it. Any welcoming tips? I’m a bit anxious about the big change, but also relieved I won’t have to put up with the bloat/adverts.

Show threadPuzzle_Sluts_4EverSep 29, 2023

A few aspects here

First? If you linux “correctly”, distro hopping is almost a non issue. The key is that you want as little as possible installed on your OS drive/partition. Because you have a package manager with any distro (that you should consider for a desktop) so installing software is really easy.

Aside from that: There are a lot of youtubes out there that mostly boil down to evaluating popular distros. But… the reality is that mostly you are looking at desktop environments with those. Sure you sometimes have different ideologies in what can be in a package manager (such as closed source nvidia drivers), but there are almost always workarounds for any consumer oriented desktop distro. I recommend just watching one and then realizing that KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong) and then picking a distro from there.

Personally? I mostly like (K)Ubuntu for my desktop. Most of the servers I work on for my day job are either rhel or debian so apt install is built into my brain at this point. And while I don’t like the ever increasing focus on flatpaks, I know enough to work around them when I need to and adding a new ppa is pretty trivial. And I have absolutely zero qualms about using the functional nvidia drivers so having that trivially built in is nice.

Although, funny enough: I am currently looking at other distros to maybe switch away from ubuntu. Mostly because I need to better understand exactly what the esm-apps are because right now it feels like Canonical is actively holding back package updates because they want people to pay for Pro and… fuck that noise.

Which, getting back to making distro hopping easy: My documents are already backed up to my NAS. Steam wise, I just need to copy the install library in my /data/nvme00 directory to a different drive (or redownload/reinstall). And then everything else on my OS drive is trivially replaceable and I just need to write a usb stick. … Or I use this as an excuse to buy an even bigger nvme drive and then use a usb adapter to transfer shit.

Show threadNatalSep 29, 2023

Okay so I’m slightly confused and I haven’t experimented with that on my server because it’s only one single drive. If I have several drives and partition one for the distro, the other drives as storage partitions. Are the data storage drives compatible between distro?

Would that mean that I could go pick a new distro, nuke the “distro drive”, but leave the others disk intact and just log in the new distro with my drives as they were?

Show threadPuzzle_Sluts_4Ever

… mostly?

As long as you aren’t encrypting those drives it mostly “just works” with maybe the occasional chown/chgrp. With the more “eclectic” distros you might run into a mess with unsupported filesystem formats but generally with any “friendly” distro you support the same general range of filesystems and don’t have to care.

I wouldn’t assume you can recover life critical data but all of that should be backed up with something other than “it is in a folder on an ssd” anyway. But for steam games and the like? Zero issues.

Sep 29, 2023 at 3:21pmWeb
Show threadNatalSep 29, 2023
Yeah I’m not worried about encryption, it’s more about convenience to not start from scratch every time, but whatever is critical is duplicated in several places and wouldn’t be lost if I were to lose the entire machine. It’s more me being lazy and wiling to avoid transferring games and music again if possible.