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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • My experience with endeavour was much the same, I switched after building a team red system. Endeavour and Arch are wonderful distros, but eventually something breaks if you don’t closely follow release notes. You either gain that level of awareness and competence to fix things yourself, or it breaks and you just wipe and reinstall.

    Not a good direction to point a fresh Linux user.


  • No. I suggested Arch and its variants for years, and I see the error of my ways. Merging pacnew files and resolving issues are well over the head of most newbie users. Arch is a great place to end up, not a place to start.

    I recommend Linux mint to start, and Fedora after you’ve learned a bit. Nobara is cool too, but it’s a version behind Fedora, so I don’t use it at the moment. Linux mint is hands down the best place to start your journey.





  • Die. We will die. The only crutch that props up our massive jump from 1 billion pre industrialized society to our current 8 billion human beings on this planet, has been cheap and plentiful fossil fuel. Notably, it is the only thing that has allowed us to practice agriculture on a scale that supports our population growth. When it’s gone, there is nothing to replace it, short of a miracle fusion revolution.

    The average carbon cost to produce an electric vehicle is about 6 tons on average, not including the battery, about the same as an ICE vehicle. Where does the energy for auto manufacturing come from? Primarily coal and natural gas, with a sliver of insubstantial wind and nuclear power. About 7 barrels of oil go into each and every tire on the road (between expended energy and actual petroleum products in the tire). Charging the battery? Coal, natural gas, and the same trickle of alternative sources mentioned above.

    Speaking of those alternative energy sources, what do we use to make them? Building a nuclear power plant is likely the most carbon intensive process ever devised, from the machinery that moves the earth, to the foundry that makes the steel. As much as I’ve always wanted to believe in a cozy eco future, every time I squint a little I can see that it’s all just a coat of green paint over the same old oil field. The people trying to sell you on oil, and the people trying to sell you on alternatives to it, are doing the same thing. Selling you something. That’s all that matters to them.

    There is no feasible alternative that changes the outcome. There is no replacement for what has allowed us to create wonders and horrors beyond our ancestors wildest dreams, and sustain a population far beyond anything we could have achieved without fossil fuels. When oil finally becomes unproductive, so will the mechanisms that hold our current civilization together, and we will wind up back in 1810 if we’re lucky, or 400ad if we aren’t.

    Call me a doomer and downvote me or whatever. It doesn’t matter.


  • At least one option I found in that price range on Amazon (US, not sure about EU)

    Discrete AMD GPUs in laptops are a very niche market, and there aren’t too many to be found. The RX6550m listed here is not the bottom of AMD’s barrel, but it’s no powerhouse. I’m sure it would run anything that isn’t too demanding, TF2 included.

    MSI Bravo 15 Gaming Laptop, 15.6" 144hz FHD, Ryzen 7-7735HS(Up to 4.75GHz), 16GB RAM, Radeon RX6550M with 4G GDDR6, 1TB SSD


  • Stating your experience level and distros that you’re interested in would be helpful, but in lieu of that, here’s my recommendation.

    Make a windows restore USB, so you can restore your system if either of these distros don’t seem to work out for you.

    First, try Linux Mint. Install it, try to exist in it for a while and see if all of your hardware functions the way it should. Learn some stuff. Mint makes it easy for the most part. Drivers are simple and everything can be done in the GUI.

    If Mint has hardware issues, try endeavourOS. It’s a rolling release, running on a fresher version of the kernel, with possibly better support for your hardware. It’s a bit more command line focused. Keep it simple. Update weekly using yay, and see how it goes.

    If neither works for you, break out that windows USB and go back to the drawing board, or keep digging. Linux is a less intimidating experience than it used to be, but it still generally requires an active learner who wants to solve problems as they arise and learn more about Linux in the process.


  • Big second for EndeavourOS. I loved Linux mint early in my distro adventures, but I had issues, sometimes steam wouldn’t launch. Sometimes my secondary monitor would lag out every minute or so. So I tried nobara, which was okay, but never fell in love with it.

    Enter EndeavourOS. In over six months I’ve had one instance of a broken package hampering my experience. I keep a backup of important files on an external drive, so I just nuked it and reinstalled. I also use BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, so if a package does create issues, now I can just boot to an older snapshot from grub and wait to update that package until the issue has cleared up.




  • Someone responded that you should install a gaming centric distro for your first rodeo. We’re all entitled to an opinion, but I couldn’t disagree more.

    Linux Mint. It’s a breeze to install, and it’ll help you learn without being too intense until you’re ready to graduate to EndeavourOS or vanilla arch. Mint is the perfect place to get your sea legs.

    Keep good backups of anything you care about, so you can let yourself make mistakes and learn in the command line. Wipe and reinstall is a viable option when you break shit, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll get good at configuring your system back to where you had it before you broke it. Takes me like 20 minutes.




  • I’ve been working on my CLI skills and knowledge over the past year, and moving to an arch based system was a little confusing for me. Using yay, pacman, and git cloning were a little over my head after being used to apt and flatpak. After the first week, it all started to click, and now I’m fine, and I definitely feel more competent in the terminal, and no longer use any gui front ends for package management.

    Mint and Pop had issues, steam would lag like crazy for the first five minutes after launch. Then after updating to the latest version of mint, steam stopped launching period. I’m sure it’s fixed by now, but that’s what drove me to jump ship, and it’s been the snappiest, cleanest experience I’ve had yet. I also love space, and the color purple, so it’s the first distro where I used their native theming and wallpapers, and shit it looks good.

    The forum has also been a pleasant experience, the community is very friendly.