I think one of the biggest misconceptions about switching to Linux is that you have to be a hardcore tech enthusiast who hates Windows. Sometimes you just want an operating system that gives you more control over your own computer.

Windows is familiar and works well for plenty of people, but the constant push toward Microsoft's preferred features, bundled services, and account integration can feel excessive when you just want to use your PC without all the extra stuff.

What I like about Linux is the freedom to choose how your system works. You can pick a desktop environment, customize your workflow, and decide which software you want running. You also have the opportunity to learn more about your computer instead of treating the operating system as a black box.

Of course, Linux isn't perfect. Gaming compatibility, specialized software, hardware drivers, and troubleshooting can still be obstacles, depending on your setup. Switching just to escape Windows can be frustrating if your essential apps don't work properly.

I think the best reason to switch is that Linux fits your needs, not that Windows is automatically bad. Try it on a live USB or dual-boot setup first, check your must-have applications, and make the decision based on your actual experience.

For those who made the switch, what finally convinced you that Linux was worth sticking with?

Arc Menu, Dash to Panel, Chrome, LibreOffice, VSCode, Steam, OBS Studio, InSync. All set.

I was thinking about using CachyOS, but I saw some people saying it was mid and that Arch itself is better. Which one should I pick ? (I'm looking for better gaming performance and customizability)

I really want to make the switch to Linux but I’m scared and overwhelmed

I guess it’s kind of normal. I’ve been on windows since I was a kid. I’ve taken my privacy much more seriously the last 2-3 years only.

Since 2-3 years ago I now self hosting almost everything I need (calorie tracker, media, Immich, password manager etc). I use truenas scale, which is beginner friendly but I use the shell from time to time, which is Linux based.

I just want to be able to handle my own data in the operating system I use every day as well. But I’m just so concerned over some thing.

Security most of all. I rely on windows defender today for example to “stay secure”. I play a couple of indie games I doubt is Linux compatible. I use a vpn all the time. I torrent things daily.

It just feels like such a steep learning curve and I feel like I’ll mess up everything when it comes to everything.

Any comforting words?

What distro does everyone recommend here?

Hello, as the title above, I have an old laptop that still function relatively well. And I wanna hook it up to a TV that has 1080p resolution. How do I go about doing that?

For more information, my laptop has a 5th gen i5, and an 8 gigs of ram ddr3L. It also has an Nvidia chip to it, that is why I'm wondering if 1080p is possible with such dedicated graphic card.

I don't know much about linux, I know that you want a certain distribution for doing a specific task, I also know that you can customize the UI to fit a certain use case. An advice on which distribution to use, and how to optimize the drivers is appreciated. thank you.

I was searching for a way to do this and never found anything that matched exactly what I needed, until I sat down for a while and just figured out keyd (with some help from Duck.ai).

Problem statement: I am coming from macOS and I have a mac keyboard (actually a Keychron keyboard in mac mode) that I want to use in Linux (Debian Trixie on a ThinkPad T14s Gen 2, fwiw). So I want Command+C to copy and Command+V to paste etc etc. I want to get all the Command modified shortcuts to do the Control shortcuts in Linux but I did not want to permanently remap my Command (Super) key to Control!! That might have been easier but for reasons I didn't want to do that.

Solution: keyd obviously but also Gnome (48) because it gets you about 45% of the way there with its out of the box keyboard shortcuts. I simply created a /etc/keyd/defaults.conf file with the following:

``` [ids] *

[main]

[meta] w = C-w a = C-a s = C-s r = C-r t = C-t n = C-n f = C-f z = C-z x = C-x c = C-c v = C-v enter = C-enter ```

Hopefully this helps someone else trying to do the same thing (or me in the future when I get a new laptop and forget how I did this).

Are all the quirks of a terminal emulator a result of historic compatibility? For example, not being able to distinguish keybindings like Ctrl-m and Return key, Ctrl-[ and ESC, Ctrl+i and TAB. Terminal capabilities and ANSI color codes. The performance overhead of running a terminal multiplexer on a terminal (emulator). Displaying graphics efficiently.

If all terminal emulator applications are nuked from the world and an interface has be rewritten to run CLI tools on, would we get back to the same fragmented terminal emulator ecosystem of many types of applications and layers of incompatibility and lack of standard behaviors? Or would there be new protocols enforced to streamline the expectations of a terminal emulator to improve the user experience (even just easily transitioning from one terminal emulator to another without custom terminfo, potential remaps, etc.)?

What posed this question is that as a Vim user, I'm revisiting my Emacs config and when running Emacs GUI (how I use it 99% of the time), the quirks of e.g. the keybinding limitations of a terminal emulator are irrelevant and I can actually use e.g. Ctrl-i and Tab as different bindings. Not only that, but running Emacs GUI has other benefits such that I don't see any reason to run Emacs on the terminal unless for some reason a graphical environment is not available. In fact, unless you're working on servers professionally, I'm not sure there are any good reasons to invest heavily in an Emacs config that is 100% compatible with CLI.

I'm using Bazzite, and I literally just switched, so my knowledge on Linux is extremely bare bones. I'd like to set up a group of windows on a screen and 'save' their layout so that I can open them all at once at any time. Specifically, I'm trying to have OBS and a few webpages open, since from what I can tell, flatpak OBS can't add custom docks. Is there a way to do this? Or is it a manual process every time?

I need help. first time putting linux mint on a macbook pro 11,1 and having issues with wifi randomly disconnecting. does anyone know a fix for this? its only showing me one driver option

so im installing ubuntu now on my laptop beside windows(on a separate physical ssd not windows ssd) to try it(i tried it before but not that long) to see if i will use it or not.

is there anything i should expect to behave differently from windows?(beyond the obvious such as not installing drivers except maybe nvidia gpu driver. using terminal,and using package managers/flatpak not random files like exes . im aware appimages exist. i also know its not the default way)

I’ve had this setup for maybe half a year now, it’s nice. I’m running FEDORA KDE PLASMA 44, and as the title says I set my pc to update and restart when done while I left for a while. Come back to pc off and unable to boot. It will power on, allow me to access bios, or toggle through kernel versions, but none of them worked. Once a kernel versions is selected it will try to boot and display the fedora logo while it thinks. Then go black screen with a flashing underscore in top left. (Uninteractable screen) If I press the power button here it will show the same fedora logo and loading circle then just turn off after a while. I have a fedora workstation live USB I’m trying to fix the issue on. I assume something failed during the update. The fedora install on my pc is on a 1tb Sabrent rocket5, no idea if that’s relevant. I’d really appreciate some help I tried YouTube videos and various Google attempts too, I think I was making progress but couldn’t get grub to reinstall. And now I may have hurt one of my partitions on my boot drive, as I ran a: fsck -a /dev/nvme0n1p1
This told me: there are differences between boot sector and its backup
this is mostly harmless. differences (offset:original/backup) 65:01/00
Not automatically fixing this
Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt. Automatically removing dirty bit
Filesystem was changed writing changes.
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 24 files, 5128/153296 clusters

New to Linux and I am just curious on the security of Linux. On windows by default there is Microsoft Defender and other software such as Bitdefender, Malwarebytes, Kaspersky and other kinds of antiviruses. It's good to have an anti virus handy, but is there any way to scan for malware such as viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, etc on you machine that you are running Linux on?

Hey, I have a really strange issue in my office, I've been using a Brother multifunction printer for a few weeks and everything worked fine, but since last week something strange is happening, printing works fine, but scanning through airscan is bugged, I use naps2 for my scanning needs, the scanner is listed in the device section with the correct IP address (let's say 192.168.1.100), but when I scan something another scanner in the office starts the scanning job, is a similar model but no the same (different IP address 192.168.1.130) and sometimes another scanner stars the job (same model as the 1st one, different ip address, 192.168.1.160) any idea on what could be happening here? I'm kinda going insane, I'm on a up-to-date Arch install

Yesterday I downloaded nobara linux n now want to learn how everything works, command lines n all

Just as the title says.
I'm on Fedora 44 Workstation running this kernel: 7.2.11-200.fc44.x86_64 (any more info you might need just ask )

i want to do the switch but I'm scared that I might break something anything I should look out for?

i don't think it's just simple as installing doas then removing sudo right?

Nothing I try in the realm of computing ever works. I just wanted to install Linux Mint on my machine. It started with the SSD, which simply wouldn't respond—whenever I tried to format it, it would vanish from the system, appearing as a completely unknown device. It reached a point where I had to move my HDD to another machine because the BIOS would corrupt the Ventoy installation the moment I turned the computer on—a problem that didn't happen on any other machine. To make matters worse, the HDD simply disappeared from the boot options. When I tried using a different machine, the Linux installer would skip the step where you choose which drive to install onto, and instead, it would try to install directly onto the bootable flash drive itself! 👍 In total, I have two machines and three hard drives that are completely inoperable—all because of the motherboard—and I have the ISO on my bootable flash drive. I have EVERYTHING I need to install Linux Mint, yet there is ALWAYS some catch that prevents me from installing a single, miserable operating system. I HATE THIS

I was messing around with my hybrid graphics settings on my nvidia-drivers (/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia) and when i rebooted then at sddm its not displaying anything, but i can still type my password in. I updated and re emerged nvidia drivers but nothing helped.

any idea what could be wrong?

Thanks in advance!
(also sorry btw im using gentoo)

my brother still using win11 with chrome
any recommendation for any better webbrowsers?
i downloaded helium in his Laptop but i guess he wont like it

Hello. I'm a CS student in South Korea. I'm so curious why Korean gov recommends Microsoft Windows only rather than supporting various operating systems including Linux. For example, most Korean gov sites use KakaoTalk, which supports Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS only, instead of mail. Similarly, they uses Hancom Office, represented as HWP, which also doesn't support Linux at all. (Even there's no viewer for HWP for Linux!) Why???

TL;DR

I'm looking for an RDP alternative for Remmina to RDP from Linux to Windows

Full disclosure. I'm a Windows sys admin. I dabble in Linux, but my knowledge of Linux is "beginner", let's say.

I have one Linux (Mint xfce) laptop that I have to use (because reasons) to connect via RDP to a Windows system using a gateway. Up until recently, I used Remmina, but it's lately gotten a bit fussy and complains about security settings. I try TLS and it works, and then it doesn't. I try NLA and it works, and then it doesn't. I try Auto and it just doesn't. Those changes are in response to the error message "It's your security settings. Try TLS or NLA or Auto."

I spoke to my organization's Linux guru, and he tells me that he's recently been having the same issue using RHEL.

Maybe this is a Windows update that's affected something, or maybe not. We haven't changed any firewall rules lately, and as noted, sometimes it works.

Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, what did you do? Or is there something better than Remmina? My googling hasn't found anything that looks good.

Thanks

what i did was

tar -czvf *.txt another_file

i forgot to add a target , the right syntax should be tar -czvf a.gz *.txt another_file

so my text.txt file was covered to be a gz tarball , can i recover it ? it's on BTRFS , i used btrfs undeletion script on deepest level , still file not found

i open the file , it's unreadable , so it isn't a text ,it's a gz archive

might be a sad story , the text file might have gone forever

the btrfs undeletion script from github that i used : https://github.com/danthem/undelete-btrfs

Linux can be incredibly rewarding, but getting started often comes with a lot of questions from choosing the right distro to figuring out security and dealing with unexpected quirks. For those who’ve been using Linux for a while, what’s one thing you wish someone had told you on day one? It could be a useful command, a distro recommendation, a mistake to avoid, or a small tip that made your experience so much better.

Your advice might save a beginner hours of frustration