BananaTrifleViolin

Both sides announced this to boost their share prices as they’re both growth stocks. Growth stocks are a trap - no company can keep on growing forever.

This announcement is a sign the AI boom is probably soon to end. Nvidia quietly announcing the $100bn deal isn’t going to happen, is Nvidia trying to reduce it’s exposure to the bubble popping. Unfortunately for Nvidia, it’s already way way too deep into the mess, and the vast majority of it’s value is speculative. The question is have they damaged their core business by chasing the AI bubble, and what liabilities will they be left with if their customers go bankrupt and don’t pay them for their product.

You don’t need to do anything, it’ll work without Windows, and grub should auto update with your distro when you do a major update (such as Kernel update)

You might want to manually update grub to remove the Windows entry just to keep it tidy. On mint it’s as simple as:

sudo update-grub

It’ll scan your installed kernels and other OS. If windows is gone, it will no longer be detected and disappear from the boot list after running this.

If you’ve set up a default OS at boot (like Windows) you might want to update the grub config files. Thats as simple as editing /etc/default/grub and setting:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0

Where 0 is the first boot entry.

You can also use:

GRUB_DEFAULT=“saved”

which will remember the last selected item and boot that. Bit redundant if you’re going down to 1 OS.

Wow it really is heading towards crisis point when you have people saying “keep feeding the beast or it’ll eat us”.

During the OpenSuSE install you can choose custom package collections (or packages). So you can install any of the DEs available and multiple DEs if you want. You can deselect the default DE and chose something else entirely.

It’s not put front and centre as an option like CachyOS seems to be doing but is easily accessed in a submenu.

The Microsoft strategy often seems to be “It worked well, but we completely redid it because we need to justify out existence. Now it barely works with new bugs”

So on my linux PC, I have made a KVM (Kernal Virtual Machine) using QEMU and made a Windows 11 machine inside it (and I bought a digital license for it), which I have work office and email set up. I personally only need to use it occasionally. If you give it enough resources it works decently & runs all windows software; although as it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card it won’t look as slick as native windows 11 machine and run GPU intense software well (you can get it it’s own dedicated video card and pass it through but really isn’t worth it for just using Excel). It means I can main linux but use Windows occasionally if I really have to. It means you can have a full Windows machine with work Microsoft account set up for Office, One Drive etc - depending on your employers policies of course. You can cut down the resources you allocate it if you want to be switching between the Windows machine and other software in Linux, but Windows can be laggy without enough resources as it’s so poorly optimised.

There are sites that guide on setting up a windows 11 machine in linux, but essentially you need to install KVM modules and Virtual Machine manager in linux (available on all distros). You do need to access your PCs bios to ensure the settings that allow virtual machines to access the CPU are on (slightly different name between AMD and Intel CPUs).

Then you create a machine in Virtual machine manager, give it plenty of resources (especially if the idea being when you use it if it’s the only think you’ll be doing, give it access to most of your CPU cores and the majority of your RAM), and create a decent size virtual hard drive file (I’d say minimum 128gb or more as Windows is bloaty - you can set the virtual drive file size to be flexible so it has a max size but the actual file size is only what is used by the guest system but some file systems still use the whole space unfortunately; not sure how Windows behaves). Download the Windows 11 installer ISO, and then add that file as a virtual CD drive for your guest machine, boot the guest machine, and you should get the Win 11 installer. The VM can only see the virtual hard drive file, so you can install Win 11 safely onto the drives it sees with no risk to your PC. Then reboot and you should have a new Windows install; test it - if it works, buy a digital license (if you want…) and install Office using your 365 account OR if you have old CDs then pass those through to the virtual machine and install as on any Windows PC.

Yeah it can be confusing; Flatseal makes it easier as it’s a GUI way of doing what is otherwise command line with flatpak itself but it still assumes some knowledge about what you’re doing and can be a bit of trial and error. The more you expose to the sandbox, the more “native” performance you can achieve but it’s at the expense of security.

In Flatseal you can set global options for all apps, or individual apps. For graphics, in the Device section, toggling the option to make the GPU available to the sandboxes may be needed - “GPU Acceleration” in the Device section. That one option can be pretty effective as GPU hardware acceleration is often important, if not essential, for programs like Handbrake (which are video transcoding).

This is equivalent to “device=dri” when launching the flatpak via the commandline.

I support KDE, Mozilla and a fediverse instance currently. A small amount to each, each month, but it is worth it to me. I pay for VPN, email, and password manager, so contributing to KDE, Mozilla and the fediverse feels just like another small set of subscriptions.

I’m lucky I can afford to do this; I think any financial contribution of any size is appreciated by the FOSS world.

EDIT: In terms of things I’m thinking of - Jellyfin and maybe Piefed. Mozilla is a bit of a question mark for me with the AI stuff; but I still value Firefox immensely.

I’m not aware of general Linux specific tools for this (game specific ones do exist). However:

• Vortex does work on Linux: https://linuxvox.com/blog/vortex-mod-manager-linux/
• So does Curseforge: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-install-curseforge-on-linux/

They both work by you running them in wine and pointing them to the game files created by Steam (or Gog or any windows game installed via Wine or Proton) in the Linux filesystem (e.g. /home/yourname/.steam/steamapps/common/game) instead of windows filesystem (e.g. C:\program files\game)

Modloaders with “bootstrap” fixes will also work; they just have to be installed and run in the same proton/wine prefix as the game. I.e. if you install Cyberpunk 2077 via steam, the bootstrap type mods need to be installed into the game folder or fake-windows file system that Proton makes for the game. It even has it’s own “drive C” folder for the rare times you need 3rd party tools. You also put tools into the game folder as you would on windows. If it has it’s own custom exe you can tell wine/proton to run that instead of the game or even before the game in the same prefix.

I mod games extensively on Linux; they work just as they do in Windows. I’ve played heavily modded Cyperpunk 2077 to completion (all the mod tools work via proton - that takes a little tweaking to get working but is doable - and many mods you just drop into specific sub folders; I played with about 50 mods and I didn’t find a single one that didn’t work on Linux specifically), Stardew Valley, Rimworld and Minecraft for example of bredth. Stardew, Rimworld and Minecraft even have linux specific tools to help.

This is less a case of games run via Linux not being moddable, and more that it has it’s own learning curve (in the same way modding on Windows has a learning curve). Once you understand how the linux filesystem and how proton/wine work, the world is your oyster. Protontricks and Winetricks are not just useful for getting games running or tweaking them, they’re a modders best friend.

Did you set your Mint to autologin to desktop? If so then your Keyring is then locked and you get prompts to unlock it when you want to use anything that needs it - websites, software like email etc. The keyring holds your passwords and credentials to pass to on as needed and keeps your system secure. If you set your desktop to not autologin - i.e. have a login screen - your keyring is unlocked automatically as you log on to the PC and you don’t keep getting prompts to unlock the keyring. You can disable the keyring entirely or give it a blank password, but it’s better to use the login screen to keep your device secure, and let the keyring do it’s thing in the background even though “login automatically” is so easy to tick and use. The wallet is the same concept on KDE desktops.

Otherwise the only password prompts you should get are similar to windows - when you want to make system level changes.

I’d recommend OpenSuSE Leap with KDE. User friendly, stable, with a good GUI for making all system changes. Fedora KDE is also a good popular distro; I’m not sure how good it’s GUI is but I’d be surprised if you need to use the terminal. People often recommend the terminal (because it IS quicker - often one step instead of “go here, click here, click here”) but there is usually a GUI way of doing everything.

The text here on the fediverse is the prologue; bit confusing but click through the link and it makes sense.

Interesting read, thank you. Also I recognise this type of procrastination: sit down to do one thing, end up installing a whole different OS :D

KDE is genuinely incredibly flexible - you can make it into pretty much any GUI that exists. The default windows like set up is fine, but there are so many easy tweaks and changes you can make to get it however you want. I have a floating dock-like set up instead of a window-like taskbar, with application launcher, icon-only view, system tray, clock and power button.

For simple tweaks yoy can right click on most component of your KDE panels and select “Show alternatives…” to see different official versions of the same component. For example, the Application Launcher offers an alternative Application Menu with cascading menus like an old-school windows start menu, or a full screen gnome-like Application Dashboard. And there are also loads more user made tools if you right click and select “Add or Manage widgets”. Every component of the desktop is a widget and can be moved, swapped out, duplicated or replaced.

It’s really not that difficult with a Global Theme; anyone can do it. There are step by step tutorials on line (such as this one from howtogeek) for people who want to do it manually. The benefit of manual is if there is a major KDE update it is more likely to be completely unaffected; very rarely Global Themes can break and need their own updates.

The Mac ones are the 2nd most popular in the Global Theme store and well maintained though.

Yeah KDE is incredibly flexible. You can get most of the way there downloading a Global Theme from KDE’s settings menu (such as MacOS Big Sur) - that lays out all the panels, including the top bar context menu, power menu, dock, left sided window buttons. There are then some extra visual themes such as cursors, icons that people can get separately if they really want to completely mimic a Mac.

No one is born knowing this stuff; everyone learns it somewhere. But omg it’s still frustrating after you spend days taking the difficult route and someone says “oh you could have just done this in 2 mins”. My sympathy to you! :D But GG on getting your parents onto Linux and saving them from wasting money on a new laptop!