Today I am moving not only myself, but my parents to Linux!
For me this is a long time coming. I discovered and started dabbling with Linux when I was 13 or so and somehow got an image of Backtrack 5 running on a Macbook Pro without virtualization (I’m still not entirely certain how I managed it) as I was always interested in IT/Security.
Eventually I went to school for IT and I’ve been working in tangents of the industry ever since, though few of my workplaces have made use of Linux unfortunately.
I have been running Debian on my personal laptop for a couple years now and I have had very few problems outside of breaking my sources.list the other day when I echo’d into it with instead of >.
I have a friend who recently fully switched over to Arch as well, and now more than ever I have found that all my friends, including those who are non-technical, are interested in learning about or moving to Linux, so I have decided now would be a good time to be an example for them.
I have made my parents aware of the ongoing and worsening problems with Windows and that their version of the OS will be out of support soon and today I’ll be putting them on Mint. I don’t expect any problems as I already had them using Open Office and other such applications since they didn’t want to buy licensing for MS Office years ago. Furthermore their computer has no special hardware/software otherwise, it’s basically just a Micro-ITX email machine that they sometimes use for printing.
I have enjoyed using Debian on my laptop so I intend to install Debian 12 to my desktop system, though I expect some complications as it has some hardware I have not had to configure on Linux before. Specifically It has an NVIDIA EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA and an NZXT Kraken Liquid CPU cooler.
I am aware that Debian has full documentation on how to go about installing and setting up the drivers for an RTX card, but if anyone has done this, I would certainly appreciate any anecdotal advice regarding the matter as well as anything I might want to know about making sure the cooler is functioning.
If anyone wants to offer advice but needs to know more about the hardware, I have the following specifically:
- PSU - Cooler Master V750 Gold V2, 750 Watt, White
- Motherboard - ATX ASUS PRIME z390-A
- Case - White NZXT H510 Elite for ATX form factor, Tempered Glass, Integrated RGB lighting
- CPU Cooling - NZXT Kraken X53 240mm AIO RGB CPU Liquid cooler, Rotating infinity mirror design, improved pump
- GPU - EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA
- RAM - Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4, White
- Storage - Two 2 TB Seagate Firecuda M.2 NVME’s
- Peripherals include a focusrite Scarlett audio interface, Wired Logitech mouse and keyboard, Logitech C920 HD Pro Camera
Thanks for any advice, and I just wanted to offer a thanks to this community at large as I have read and learned some very neat things since I joined Lemmy.
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I love this! The whole family ship is switching to Linux!
Haha, if only my brother would move away from Mac, but I understand why his use case warrants his choice.
OpenOffice
Most Linux distros come with LibreOffice pre-installed. That’s what you want. OpenOffice pretty much stopped being developed in 2010 and the developers moved over to LibreOffice.
And for some reason, to this day, I still end up accidentally calling it OpenOffice two out of three times.
Good to know, I’m certain they wouldn’t have a problem as they learned open office easily enough. Can confirm Mint comes with Libre Office installed as well as Thunderbird which they also currently use as their email client. Thank you!
Oh, so LibreOffice is actually a fork of OpenOffice, meaning back in 2010, the devs copied the code from OpenOffice and have been developing it further from there. So, it’s like your parents just got upgraded to the newest edition of the office suite they were using. A lot of it should still be familiar to them.
Basically, the devs had to change the name for legal/political reasons. In all other ways, LibreOffice is the continuation of OpenOffice.
Beautiful, I did not realize it was a fork, this is even better news!
My workstation runs Ubuntu 22.04 with an AMD GPU, but I use an NVIDIA GPU (A4000 which is basically a 3070) for VFIO virtual machines, mostly windows. I did try Debian 12 vm with VFIO and had zero issues getting the Nvidia card set up. My VMs have secure boot /TPM enabled so no problems there either. I don’t remember the steps I took but basically disable secure boot in bios, install the proprietary driver, update the kernel, reenable secure boot. Debian was the easiest Linux distribution I tried to get set up. I also tried Ubuntu 23.10 and that worked ok. I think Fedora was OK but cannot remember. Bazzite surprisingly was a fail.
Also when all else fails, check the arch wiki. Obviously not tuned to Debian but generally most things you can figure out and the documentation is top notch.
Also wanted to mention if you’re not striping those Firecudas, definitely assign one of them to your home directory. If you do stripe, I’d create a 3.5TB home directory and leave 500 GB for / and your swap file.
Good luck.
ETA: in my experience, drivers either work right away or not at all so good news is that if your setup fails, it should fail fast, unlike windows that tries to find a workaround for janky configurations.
This is top tier information, thank you very much :)
Very glad to hear that at least one person out there had a good experience in doing what I will be trying to do.
I am not currently striping the storage, but traditionally I have used one as the drive for the entire OS and then the secondary one is for extended file storage for things I frequently access which require a large amount of storage (I have a game called STALKER Gamma installed which is essentially a collection of mods so it is hundreds of GB, I have enormous files for 3D work such as textures etc, and a great deal of music/video files).
I am especially appreciative you brought this up though as I had not considered changing the configuration. To me, striping sounds like it might be the way to go based on how I tend to use the storage, but this might be because I am unaware of the benefits of having a full disk dedicated to /home.
Can you expand on why that may be preferable as I would be super interested to hear about the potential benefits!
Thanks
Welcome! Based on the GPU I assume you’re into gaming, and Debian is not the optimal distro for that because it’s focused on stability and is not as up-to-date as other distros. Personally I use CachyOS (based on Arch) on my gaming PC and it works very well. EndeavourOS is similar and is also based on Arch — it’s what I use on my laptop. Bazzite (based on Fedora) is another popular gaming distro. If you really prefer Debian you may also want to look at PopOS, which is based on Ubuntu, which is itself based on Debian. You can by all means use Debian if that’s what you really want, but there’s a good chance you’ll run into issues that wouldn’t appear with distros designed for gaming, especially since you have an Nvidia GPU which tend to have driver issues with Linux in general.
Thank you, all good suggestions. I have looked at Bazzite and another user had recommended EndeavourOS so if things go awry then I will likely try one of them.
I am hoping that as long as I can get the card functional I will be ok. I have been running lower-requirement games through proton on my Debian laptop without needing to install additional libraries and they all work well.
If too many problems are introduced from the card I will probably distro hop (which should be easy as I keep good backups) and see how things look elsewhere.
Otherwise I will save some money and see about a comparable AMD card going forward in any case!
Thanks for your advice!
Nvidia released their OS drivers. I think 565 are OS… But even before that I think nvidia bad comes from historical issues that don’t happen anymore but ymmv
focused on stability and is not as up-to-date as other distros
This community really should stop FUD peddling about debian.
stableis not the only debian release, and there are multiple ways to pull newer package versions. For instance, anyone who can read a manual can run a cutting edge rolling release debian box with this simple incantation:sudo sed -i 's/bookworm/sid/g' /etc/apt/sources.liststableis their default, but debian can be just as “up-to-date” as you want it to be.I find it is all pretty relative as well. People do talk about Debian as if it’s always boring and ancient, but I think the release cycle on Debian stable is something like every 2 years? So it’s not super out of date for what I use. As I said in another comment I think a few rust libraries I wanted for installing the Helix editor were not available on Bookworm, but other than that there really isn’t too much that I want right this second that even warrants me changing the repos to Sid. Everything I needed to install and run Kakoune was available so I’m just running that as my editor for now instead.
I assume people do not want to run an OS that has “testing” or “unstable” in its name.
If you don’t need the latest packages, Debian is the way to go but if you do need the latest packages, you are much better off with a distro that is primarily made for that.
You can do that, or you can install Cachy or Bazzite and not have to take any extra steps, not to mention if you need to you have community support from people who are overwhelmingly using it for the same purpose as you rather than greybeards who never leave emacs. I’m not anti-Debian, but for a first-time Linux gamer it really isn’t a great recommendation.
PopOS is in between generation shift from gnome to cosmic.
Hard to recommend it to anyone who aint willing to deal with Cosmic Alpha.
I think in 1 year it will be the go too for any normie Debian enjoyer tho.
I doubt s76 will push an update until Cosmic is out of beta, let alone alpha.
I am planning on raw dogging once it is beta…
Alpaha already works well enough that
You can download 24 verion with alpha though
I uses PopOS for a while and liked it a lot, but I’m so used to Arch-based distros that I don’t think I can go back. I may use Cosmic as me DE once it’s out of beta, though.
Wishing you luck. Linux is fun AF.
Thank you and I agree, the power on the command line is something I miss every day I use windows so I believe I will be much happier after the switch!
few of my workplaces have made use of Linux unfortunately.
Without the right punctuation, this reads as if they specifically used Linux in an unfortunate way.
You should use Linux in a fortunate way.
Have you considered other distros? I’ve had lots of success with the immutable fedora variants, which offer great stability and NVIDIA drivers in the base system. If you need apt, you create a new Debian container in the box buddy and make that container be your default when opening a terminal.
Gnome variant: https://projectbluefin.io/
KDE variant: https://getaurora.dev/
Gaming variant: https://bazzite.gg/
They are all the same distro with different desktop setup and default apps. You can install one of them and seamlessly switch to another one without losing any data.
Thank you for your advice, I had looked at Bazzite as well, but wanted to try for Debian first as it is simply where I have the most personal experience and I enjoy the bedrock-tier stability despite not having the cool shiny new things (There are some things I cant install yet as they are new and written with rust libs not available for the current Debian release).
If the graphics card creates too much trouble for me I am likely to distro hop and would be looking at Bazzite, EndeavorOS, or one of the other suggestions from this thread, so I really appreciate your suggestions and advice. Thank you!
you have a super modern pc, i’d recommend you use endeavour is so easy you just need to learn yay and pacman but honestly it is super easy
Thank You, I will take that under consideration :)
i was liking endeavor but had to switch cause they started putting AI slop desktop backgrounds in updates
yeah it is completely unnecessary, they’re not even pretty wallpapers tbh. it makes life easier to use endeavour* so i keep using it. What distro are you now?
i was thinking of switching to vanilla arch but ended up going the other way and installed Nobara KDE on my laptop. I’ve had it on my main machine for a while and really like it. i prefer tiling on a laptop too and normally use i3 but i’ve been able to get a satisfactory tiling setup within KDE using Krohnkite.
