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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • You should have a live USB of the distro you want to use and ensure you have backups of all the data you care about. Then the easiest/quickest/least error prone way is to just wipe the whole drive and reinstall the distro from the live USB. They typically have an option to wipe and install things from an empty drive. Then just restore your data from your backups.

    You could also, after creating backups, from a live USB environment delete the windows partitions and resize the linux ones - being careful not to delete the EFI partition as that is where the boot loader lives. You can optionally delete the windows boot loader from the EFI partition as well. If done right you should still be able to boot into your linux system afterwards though when missing with partitions like this, especially when you don’t know what you are doing, it can be easy to break the boot systems. These can be fixed from a live environment and there are many guides out there on how to do that.

    You can always just reinstall the system again if you mess things up and cannot figure out how to fix them - so always prep for that case by backing up everything you care about first.





  • nous@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlCleaning up packages?
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    14 days ago

    Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

    In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

    And remember that you can recover from anything, even removing base packages or bootloader ones with a live cd and chroot or using pacman with a different root with the --root /mnt flag to pacman.

    Otherwise if your system still boots it is just a matter of following the install instructions for whatever is not working like you did the first time.



  • nous@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlGetting used to Helix
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    1 month ago

    IMO the best thing is to just start using it. You will start to pick things up fairly quickly then. Puzzles don’t often ingrain different ways todo things and often focus on weird or niche things that don’t come up as often. They can be a nice supplement to not a substitute for just using it in real world usescases.

    I do also find it helpful to read the shortcut keys on their site to get a feel for what is available. You won’t remember everything but it can be useful to know what is possible. Then when you hit a problem you may remember reading about something that can help and go look it up again.




  • Just dont format the drive when installing a new distro. BTRFS or not you can delete the system folders manually first if needed but I believe that some if not all distros will delete the system folders for you (at least ubuntu used to do this last I tried). And if not you can do it manually.

    It does not matter if you have a separate partition or not for /home installers won’t touch it if it already exists except to create a new user if needed. Remember, all the installers do is optionally format the drives, mount them then install files into those drives. If you skip the formatting and manually do that partitioning (or using an existing partition layout) it will still mount and write to the same places regardless of it they are separate partitions or not. So a separate partition does not add any extra protection to your home files at all.

    But regardless of what you do you should ALWAYS backup your home data anyway. Even with separate partitions or subvolumes the installer can touch or delete anything it wants to and you can easily click the wrong button or accidentally wipe thing. At most preserving your home saves you from restoring from a backup it should not be done instead of backup.


  • There is no problem with having home on a different disk. But why do you want swap on the slower disk? These would benefit from being on the faster disks. Same with all the system binaries.

    Personally I would put as much as possible on the faster disk and mount the slower somewhere that the speed matters less. Like for photos/videos in your home dir.

    /boot can be anywhere though if you are getting a grub error that suggests the UEFI firmware is finding grubs first stage but grub is having issues after that. Personally I don’t use grub anymore, systemd-boot is far simpler as it does not need to deal with legacy MBR booting.


  • My point is the different levels of just working are subjective, not objective. I personally have spent far more time fixing bugs or just reinstalling ubuntu systems then I have over the same period for Arch systems. So many of my ubuntu installs just ended up breaking after a while where I have had the same Arch install on systems for 5+ years now. Could never get a Ubuntu system to last more then a year.

    Everyone has different stories about the different OSs. It is all subjective.


  • nous@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlWindows doesn't "just work"
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    2 months ago

    You can cherry-pick examples of problems from every OS. That is my point. They all have issues that you may or may not encounter and quite a few that would make people from other OSs scratch their head and think what the hell the devs are thinking. Pointing out one issue of one OS does not change any of that.

    Which is proven by the other replys to your comment - others dont find this issue to be as show stopping as you do and just live with it or dont use it at all. How many issues do you do the same for on your favorite OS?


  • There is no perfect OS that just works for everyone. They are all software so they all have bugs. People how say an OS just works have never hit those bugs or have gotten used to fixing/working around or flat out ignoring them.

    This is true of all OSs, including Windows, Linux and MacOS. They are all differently buggy messes.

    Linux is the buggy mess that works best for me though.


  • Realtime is important on fully fledged workstations where timing is very important. Which is the case for a lot of professional audio workloads. Linux is now another option for people in that space.

    Not sure Linux can run on microcontrollers. Those tend to not be so powerful and run simple OSs if they have any OS at all. Though this might help the embedded world a bit increasing the number of things you can do with things that have full system on chips (like the Raspberry pi).



  • That is a bit more expensive and complex. Looks like this is configured with a couple of resistors for 5v from USB which is simple to get and a voltage reg to drop down to 3v3 optionally. Full PD requires a chip and active negotiation for higher voltage levels. Though there are chips that do that it does increase the complexity and cost and soldering skills a bit. Might not be worth it if all you work on is 5v or 3v3.




  • And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

    Incrementally over time by reading the documentation and/or manuals of the commands I need to run and looking up how others solve the problems that I need to get other ideas about things (even, periodically, for things that I already know how to do to see if anyone has found a better way to do it or if a new tool has come out that helps). And trying things out/experimenting with different ways of doing things to find out what works well or not.