Mastodawn

A Linux noob (*) live-toots their Linux PC setup experience!

(*) I have used Linux as my primary OS in... the previous millennium. It was 1998-2000 I think, and was Debian 2.x, on a 486 with 4MB RAM and 80MB hard drive. But I have used Windows since 2001, and also Mac since 2006.

So! Let's try Fedora now, and see what has changed in all these years.

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Okay: Fedora site as a downloadable ISO and utility to write this into a USB stick. Then you can boot into actually working Fedora from that, that also functions as an installer. I like! I picked the KDE flavor of Fedora by the way. 1/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Uhh: From the booted USB, I start the installer. Since my Windows partition takes up all the disk space, it seems to only suggest to format it? I was expecting some sort of “ an we shrink your windows partition” option. 2/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Uhh: However! The same live OS I just booted into has a KDE Partition Manager app, so I’m going to use that to resize the windows partition.

That… just took four hours with no progress bar. Disk (fast SSD) was chugging at 20MB/s while resizing 2TB partition down to 1.2TB.

It worked! But four hours with no progress indicator. Not nice. 3/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Nice: the rest of actual install was really fast, several minutes perhaps. Booting into actual installed OS just works, internet (wired) just works. I did not check audio yet lol :) 4/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Very nice: the "search" that happens when you press Start button equivalent (or windows key) feels nicer than on Windows! I did not know how "terminal" is called (turns out: "Konsole"), but typing either "terminal" or "command" or "console" all work and show it as a result.

Windows search most of the time works if you type things exactly, but *sometimes* even when you type app name exactly it goes "nope, never heard of it, want to search the internet?" 5/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Nice: Installing apps via "download" route: 1password works, sourcegit (feels like closest alternative to @fork_dev on Linux - https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit) works. So far so good! 6/

GitHub - sourcegit-scm/sourcegit: Windows/macOS/Linux GUI client for GIT users

Windows/macOS/Linux GUI client for GIT users. Contribute to sourcegit-scm/sourcegit development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Shit: putting computer (this is PC, not a laptop) to sleep then does not wake it up. Had to reboot. After reboot, a dialog pops up asking if I want to report a problem; speaks of "noveau" which I assume is (nvidia) GPU driver something something. Did not test yet if this was one-off or would happen on every sleep; that would suck. Bug report experience next! 7/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Confusing: initial bug report dialog nice, I can see various info. Then it asks me for bugzilla API key (?). Then starts some KDE Wallter Service, which then says "error", and also then error about "DBus Secret Service". Hey maybe no need to call secret service just yet, mkay?

I don't think anyone who's not a coder would get past all that. I'm not sure I did, TBH. 8/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Nice: taking screenshots is same shortcut as on Windows (Win-Shift-S, drag to select region). Nicer magnifier than on Windows. 9/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 22

Oof: installing JetBrains CLion. That went well, including their Toolbox app. However, CLion interface is full of artifacts, which feel like some sort of GPU "tiling" issue? Will have to investigate. (GPU is RTX 3080 Ti, drivers are whatever Fedora 42 has, which I think are open source NVK stuff) 10/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 23

Oof continues: all the replies said "yeah nouveau nvidia driver is not good, get the closed source one", and of course Fedora itself does not tell you that in any way. Googling for it shows up a ton of somewhat conflicting instructions, with *I think* this one being "the most official"? https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

The instructions are okay for someone who's been using computers for 30 years, but I don't believe any "more casual user" would not give up there. 11/

Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 23

Oof: followed instructions, installed "akmod-nvidia", whatever that is, and the instructions for secure boot brouhaha. And it boots! Into a 1024x768 resolution, and claims my display only supports that one. No UI garbage artifacts in CLion! But it is unusable at this resolution of course. So... further digging time now? 12/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 23

Eek: after putzing around with very conflicting info out there for, I dunno, two hours?, turns out the mistake was that I had booted into 6.16.12 boot entry instead of 6.17.4 one. Why there are three of them there? I've no idea. Why I booted into 6.16.12? Because it was the default. Why it is the default? I've no idea. 13/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 23

Oof: turns out, all I needed to do was:
sudo grubby --set-default /boot/vmlinuz-6.17.4-200.fc42.x86_64

Then reboot, then:
sudo dnf install "kernel-devel-$(uname -r)" "kernel-headers-$(uname -r)"
sudo akmods --force --kernels "$(uname -r)"
echo -e "blacklist nouveau\noptions nouveau modeset=0" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
sudo dracut --force --kver "$(uname -r)"

And then things work! Easy peasy, right? 🤦 14/

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Aras Pranckevičius Oct 23

Okay: now things are rolling! After guessing that you have to do `sudo dnf install g++ mesa-libGL-devel libXi-devel libXcursor-devel`, I can build some of my smol projects, e.g. https://github.com/aras-p/smol-cube from CLion IDE, and it builds and even runs. Progress! 15/

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Alexander Samarin Oct 23

@aras text looks quite nice! Do you use fractional scaling on the KDE? I've checked it a year or so ago and text was blurry. Also, could you please post a more complete screenshot of CLion IDE running under KDE? 😊