I kinda agree with setting up a separate home drive, but must admit I gave up out of laziness some time back. I have basically had a single partition consistently for a greater part of 10 years! Frankly, I have not really broken my system in almost five to six years, and that speaks to how much Linux has polished its implementation across distros. But I used to have a separate drive, and I have to admit it was primarily so I could f@#$g distro hop! :-P I think I have pretty much tasted them all, and settled on Pop for a while. Had to move back to Ubuntu, even though I didn't want to given my general distaste for Canonical, when the screen brightness control regression popped back up with Nvidia driver version 465.xx. It's still not been resolved, as a quick search on Nvidia developer forums would attest, and Ubuntu still has the serve 450.xx drivers in the repo!
You should know there are people who see you but don't have internet access, so your videos really reach more audience than what RUclips knows. I used to watch a lot of content without even knowing what felt like seen the subscribe button everyone talked about or the famous "Google search". So, YES, YOUR PIECES OF ADVICE for not using linux without internet are not outdated, they are useful, THANKS
I started with debian in 1998, I totally understand your point about internet being essential. I did manage to get Wolfeinstien :ET and Tremulous working well with graphics acceleration though :)
@@CrisisDigital LOL the funny part is I never have had those options work together with the rotate option on all videos, unless I was using videos. I suggest you try mpv or smplayer, they work great for me.
It's insane how much easier the out of box experience is these days. My first exposure was a Mandrake Linux CD-ROM I got from a friend in the early 2000's. I had no internet and no idea what I was doing. Fast forward a few years later and I too was struggling with ndiswrapper and getting my sound card working. Now I just install Fedora on my modern laptop and everything "just works", there's a modern(ish) app store with Flatpaks, and gaming has even viable.
I honestly had to chuckle when that point was raised. I installed my first Linux (SuSE) in the early 90s as a young teenager (on a x386 or x486). No CD ... 3.5" floppy disks. Many floppy disks. Very, very many floppy disks. Which also meant that a) I needed to learn and understand from the get-go how to partition a hard disk AND have two OSs. Obviously, I also had to use the command line instead of GUI. The thing I don't do very much is "distro-hopping". I usually rather try and figure out a work-around by using the terminal (or TTY) ... which is sometimes frustrating because most Howtos either tell you which (near enough) GUI App you can use OR are entire command line sequences without any solid explanation what every command line exactly does/ means. I've got the impression Linux is diverting somewhat into a group which easily can work everything using the "man" command and another group needing YT videos. And both groups frown upon one-another.
Damn, this week I installed Arch Linux GUI on my uni desktop and everything worked fine! It's a basic AIO we use for web browsing and some light programming and I can frequently update it.
It might have gotten better, but it isn't near the "it just works" definition. Installed Fedora 35 a couple of months ago...couldn't get almost anything I wanted to run.
This reminds me of when I had a dual boot of Windows 98SE and Windows 2000. I nuked and was going to reinstall both (or maybe 2000, I don't remember). What I do remember is backing up the C:\My Documents folder, completely forgetting that most of my documents were in different spot in Windows 2000 and since I was backing up far more than just this folder, I backed up my stuff overnight. and didn't realize I didn't have my files until after I had formatted and reinstalled. Yep, I feel your pain.
@@FFVison C:\My Documents ! Oh the nostalgia! Whenever someone harps on about how the 90s were a better time I'll remind them of the days of C:\My Documents .
Seeing the hoops you had to jump through back in the day to use Linux gave me a new appreciation for the internet and for how far Linux has come over the years. I can totally see where Linux's reputation of being too hard for most people comes from. The fresh install experience is a lot nicer now compared to only a few years ago.
If you have some software that only supplies source code and has a basic website with very little information, in my opinion, that is not very professional. That’s fine for people who have experience with Linux but it is not appropriate for the general user. Fortunately, a lot of software is available in the store of your distribution. Some software, such as LibreOffice is available as DEB files or RPM files.
to me arch wasnt difficult to install i just followed the archwiki and a videoguide and now im happy with my distro and i will continue to rice it wine is a gift from heaven.
@@gtPacheko I don't want to agree with you because it looks nice, but I have to agree that it feels bloated af. Oh also it broke like, 15 times on me, reinstalling it for the 16th time I decided to nuke it and install something else.
You're a very strange person. That's a bit like telling a student physicist 'I think the first job you should go for is head of the Nuclear Fusion programme at CERN. 😀
I partially disagree with the "keep $HOME on a separate partition". Using the same home directory with different distros could cause configuration conflicts since different distros could contain different versions of the same program or subsystem, just like installing KDE on a Gnome system causing problems. That said, I always keep my personal files on partitions other than the system partition, but I did that on Windows, too.
Nowadays many distro's keep a home subvol (in btrfs/zfs) so it is easier to keep snapshots and backup. Also you can use linked subvol with conflicting deleted on multiboot systems.
Yeah, I like to keep my $HOME clean so I wouldn't want to have all kinds of config files from different OSs and DEs in one place. I back up my personal files on a separate disk, this way I have redundancy and if I install a new distro I just copy the files. It takes some time but it's no big deal. And as for configuration, I keep crucial dotfiles in Github and for things like the browser I just accept there'll be some things to click through.
I just change the name of my old folder to something random (eg. /home/abcdef), then install the new distro with the correct name, then copy the files from abcdef to the new folder, and tell it to skip the conflicting files & folders.
I first started with Linux back in 1995 or so. At the time, I was running OS/2 Warp as a primary desktop OS, but needed to work with an odd programming language for a compiler class (SML/NJ). The current version of that compiler was very old for OS/2, so my choice was to either install Linux and the current version at home, or drive back to campus every night to do my homework. So, my first install was Slackware 3.0 (something like 15-20 floppy disk images). This was before the era of kernel modules. So, if you wanted your sound card or video card to work, you had to redo your config and recompile your kernel. And then there was diddling with my XF86 config files to make sure the monitor frequencies were all set correctly. You kids get off my lawn.
One thing I did was trying to replicate windows as much: avoiding GNOME and other DE's that could not set me up with start menu on the left and clock on the right, ricing the desktop to imitate windows 10, even messing with /etc/fstab so I could "simulate" having C: and D: drives. the only thing I carry on from windows is coloring my system monitors in the same color as task manager graphs (blue CPU, purple RAM, green Disk, etc). It is just so I can know at a glance what that means without labels.
i never paid much attention* to the graph coloring on Windows yet still (somewhat) subconsciously imitated that by making my CPU graph teal and my RAM graph pink (not exact colors, but very close)
I pretty much did that when I moved over to Linux was making it "look" like Windows (been using it sporadically for 20 years, but only moved over 18 months ago). Its one of the great things about Linux is you can make it look how you like - you can make it "look and feel" like Windows without the Windows annoyance. Colours, task manager placement, cursors, icons, folder colours etc. Which is great when you're first moving over so you feel more at home. These days I don't worry too much about how it looks - except removing the baby poo green colours from Manjaro 😂🤣.
I don't use a separate /Home partition, but I also enjoy the process of going through all my stuff and setting up a fresh system install. I see it a bit like spring cleaning. A fresh install. A fresh start. The important stuff is backed up of course.
Seriously, distrohopping is a necessary "evil". Evil because you feel like you waste your time into moving through other systems and reconfiguring the whole thing. But with that, I learned how to create my dotfiles and simplify most of the configuration. Bonus points with using Nix+home-manager, that helped even more. And as Nick said, you learn about other systems. Or you could try using a VM, but the experience of configuring physical hardware was more enriching for me, because that's how I learned to be way more cautious when using CLI disk managing tools.n
To be fair distro hopping is much, much easier today than it was 8 years ago. Internet is faster overall so it doesn't take forever to download something (that you may need to download again if connection falls) There are videos everywhere to show if it is worth your time. And then there is Ventoy, you can just drag it to a pendrive and check it out. No need to wait ten to thirty minutes booting a flashdrive and hope it works out.
i've been scared of distro hopping because i really dislike losing things, my internet is horrible so having to download so many things again would be a nightmare.
Yes, i agree. I stuck with Ubuntu for 15 years, but after the snap packs issues i started distro hopping. Wow what a big difference when you find distros that are working fast and easy.
Probably my biggest mistake when I started using Linux was to remove Python from my Ubuntu 9.10 system. Since I hade recently learned C and developed a superiority complex against Python and thought that my system should be clean of such a horrible language, so I removed it without realizing that Gnome 2 partially depended on it so I nuked the desktop without realizing it. At the time I was not very proficient in the terminal so I ended up reinstalling the system (and I did not at the time have a separate partition for my home directory so I lost all my data). Other than that I think rising the shit out of a Linux system was a pretty big noob mistake that I did. Don't get me wrong, one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that you can make your system look and behave exactly as you want it, but if you just are starting out with Linux you might be tempted to follow some random guide on the internet to make your system look in certain way and destroying it in the process, and that might discourage you from keep using Linux. Instead I think one should take it slow maybe do one small thing at a time and learn how different programs works. Also I have found over the years that for the most parts the default settings often works best; after all they where chosen by someone that understands the program way better than you could without spending a lot of time studding the source code. In short, Linux gives you freedom under responsibility.
Nuking python seems like such a strange thing to me. I get the flawed reasoning, but god that would have made things inordinately challenging for no real reason!
@@TheXipherZero I once did that when I was new to linux (used zorin) and wanted to update python. So I installed the new python and then uninstalled the old one... Even the tty didn't work anymore. Good thing I have a friend who taught me that you can use live systems to fix systems
@@TheXipherZero I had only been using Linux for about a year at that time and didn't know anything about how it works. But as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20
There were times in my life when I literally brought the Internet on a flash drive. In my parents' house, the natural disaster damaged the communication lines for several weeks. Mobile Internet in that area works very poorly. So I downloaded videos and brought them on a flash drive. This practice is still common in some remote cities, where the Internet works only via satellite, which is why it is too expensive. So people bring content on physical media and share it through the city's local area network. The situation is similar in some countries where ordinary citizens do not have access to the Internet for various reasons. But they can still watch videos brought by someone on physical media. There are also distributions where installation of software from the Internet is not provided. For example, Elbrus OS (for Russian processors of the same name). It uses apt, but no remote repositories (adding third-party repositories will most likely break the system). But this is normal, given that this is a specialized system not for a wide range of users (which does not prevent you from downloading the x86-64 version for testing). But in general, you are right - it is difficult to use Linux without the Internet in most cases.
That's remind me to my daily life 6 years ago. I had to leaf my village to download videos and come back to watch it because there's only satellite internet and that was too expensive for us. But I have to say that the Internet development in our country dramatically accelerate since the government invest into it. It still a sadly truth that our government needs up to 2019 to realize how important the Internet is and that they need a pandemic, too, to realize that DSL is not enough and we need glas fiber. I mean, Germany has the money at least…
I am new to linux, and just today I created my separate home partition (after this video). Using Fedora 36 from less than a month and I am enjoying every bit of it.
My biggest mistake was buying a book about Ubuntu after I had downloaded Ubuntu ! Nothing worked as written in the book and I could not understand it and left Ubuntu and Linux :( A few years later I tried installing Linux Mint ( without any books) and everything worked great and I got hooked on Linux :) I then found out that the book I had bought described the PREVIOUS version of Ubuntu and the new version was had a completely different GUI ... A typical beginners mistake although the author of the book SHOULD have written the version, he was describing and should have shown how to check the version. That would have save me a lot of time ... Regards from Denmark
I did the same, but the book worked really for me well since it came with an Ubuntu 8.04 CD as well. I still have both, though the CD is probably uber scratched now.
I dont use a separate partition for home but instead use a separate subvolume in BTRFS as it means i dont have to worry about filling either partition. Sure a separate partition could prevent data loss (if i didnt have a backup) if the filesystem went corrupt but the odds of that are low and if the parition went corrupt odds are it took my other partitions with it too. When reinstalling i can just delete the other subvolumes and recreate them.
The problem with distro hopping is the same with switching to Linux in general: You have to re-setup your workspace and learn the things you already knew all over again. And that for no other reason than _oh look, this looks even more shiny_ . Switching to Linux is sooo much work if you are used to a different OS. The act of changing your entire OS is not a _20 Minutes Adventure_ . "You don't learn anything new" is also not really a good argument for somebody who needs their PC to be reliable because it's their _bread and butter_ machine that is used for work. If the system fails they could no longer work and have an income. And us tech nerds have to accept that most computer end users are just that: end users. As long as it works it's perfectly fine. (Yes, we have to educate ourselves and check out what's new so we can tell the non-tech nerds - I for my part outsource that part to you, Nick) As Anthony from Linus tech Tips put it: You end up picking the distro with the default settings that seem most sane to you and tweak it to your liking.
I used to use windows primarily, but I used the Ubuntu live cd many times to rescue files work files and family member's files from their computer. Over the years I spent a lot of time trying to reinstall programs I no longer had the install media for or had to always worry about install keys, etc (on windows). I always purchased legitimate windows, office, visual studio, mssql. (some were student editions as a student) The builtin backups were harder in windows, networking more complicated, etc. Switching completely to linux for me wasn't as much work as windows upkeep. But yeah, switching for no reason from distro to distro is a pain if you don't have to.
I beg to differ While Anthony is a tech god for many people, I use Arch (btw) and there are no default settings xD Installing and setting something as easy as Manjaro actually IS a "20 Minutes Adventure" - if you know what you're doing I actually think that the approach of "end users" is completely wrong and companies like Apple, making money on dummies, shouldn't even exist Everyone should know what they're doing and shouldn't be allowed to connect to the internet without knowing at least some basic principles. It's safer both for them and for the others.
I dont think you really have to learn 'everything' again. Most distros have a main desktop like KDE or GNOME and then preselect the packages they feel make it work best. The only real big difference might be the package managers used.
@@Get-Rekt LOL no, seriously why would you gatekeep using a PC? There are millions of people who live fulfilling lives without being good at any sort of tech whatsoever but regularity interact with Apple or Linux/Windows PCs, elitism gets us nowhere.
i have been doing that for years . when i need to install a software i try to find deb files and install . if it had any dependencies so that software didn't work i simply stop trying to install that instead of installing from package manager . now i try to do most things from terminal.
@@vaishakhgk2006 When Im in Ubuntu land and have to deal with deb packages I tend to rely pretty heavily on gdebi to deal with dependency resolution. I learned early on to avoid dep hell at all costs. # sudo apt install gdebi-core (Gets you the cli gdebi utility) # sudo gdebi to install the package with dependency resolution.
First experience with Linux was browsing a chain store picking up a boxed version of Linux Mandrake off the shelf. I had *no idea* what I was getting into. My thought process at the time was "Cool! a Windows alternative!" but I didn't consider that hardware support wouldn't be as mature as Windows was at the time. Long story short, the install process (which resembled those DOS game installers of the late 80's - early 90's) didn't warn me about undetected hardware. So after that was done, I found myself with a broken X installation that tried to initialize my monitor at an out of-range resolution and refresh rate, and my Windows partition was wiped. I also had no sound, power management didn't work, and if I tried to print a document it would spit out endless garbage pages until I unplugged the printer.🤣 The best part was that inside the box was a card offering phone support at a per-minute charge. At the time it seemed like some kind of scam to get money via support. Today I run Arch -- and everything works, even wireless printing and scanning (and several "Windows-only games" thanks to Proton and VKDX 😎) We've certainly come a long way!
honestly, not distro hopping in the beginning is a good thing. as a new user its already an overwhelming experience as it is. by staying on one distro for a few years, you can get used to the fundamentals in the world of linux. without having to relearn new things each time you try a new distro. yes its good to explore new distros, when you are ready for it that is.
I made a mistake of installing multiple desktop environments in Ubuntu. The OS was mostly functional, but it ran in limp mode. Some programs were also broken. Nowadays you can work around broken programs by installing them as flatpaks, etc. I wouldn't recommend installing multiple DE. Another "mistake" I made involved encrypting my home directory. Encryption works well. But, it gave me a headache when I tried to copy home directory files from one distro to another. I no longer encrypt my home directory.
The biggest mistake was to migrate all mission critical files (aka. music and stuff) to new ReiserFS partition somewhere in 1999, without making copy. Then I lost all data in power outage.
I remember my first wifi trouble with linux. My laptops had broadcom wifi module, but fedora and ubuntu didn't came with it pre-installed. So I had to connect an Ethernet cable to install driver before I could use wifi. But of-course at that time, wifi only routers were popular choice for students like me. So I had to use my phone as usb modem, to install drivers so that I could use wifi.
@@TheLinuxEXP Some Broadcom chips are still pain in the ass to work with My friend has a Dell Latitude with a frikken Broadcom wifi module (which, to be fair, doesn't work well even with windows) and the experience wasn't great even after installing the correct drivers. I had to give her my TP-Link TL-WN725N USB Adapter (a really reliable one, actually. I deffinitely recommend that one :)) Also, I have a USB Adapter with a broadcom chipset and it doesn't even get detected... (and it actually works with winshit)
I've installed linux on mum's PC years ago and no more support requests after that apart for some initial configuration/explanations. I have also not distrohopped a lot. 1 year on ubuntu, 1 on manjaro and arch after that. I do not regret that as I can do whatever I want now and any further hopps would not benefit me much
I think dual booting is good only for games at this moment, due to anti-cheats but I hope soon enough there will be more support for Linux gaming with proton. It’s not a bad idea to have a windows instance strictly for games if you are a gamer.
Dual booting is helping with more sophisticated video editing software, the other peripheral programs that were windows only friendly are slowly getting better and better with Linux
I started using Linux after ordering that very same Ubuntu 6.06 CD in 2006. After a little distro hopping I landed on Debian. It has been my main OS since 2009. Having said that, I agree with most of what you say, except: 1. A separate home partition was recommended for Ubuntu users many years ago, but I have never made one as I tend to stick around with whatever I have installed for a while. Instead, I made a /data partition. It would be perfect for your music, so you didn't have to rip your music so many times. ;) 2. Flatpak: They sap system space and resources. I would only use them as a last resort.
Been using that "technique" on Windows for years so that I could easily nuke the OS drive when I get a virus. lol. Never really thought about doing it as well on Linux.
Two of my personally hard-learned lessons: - Know the hardware in your PC/laptop; even if you're installing a user-friendly distro like Ubuntu, if you run into a problem like your printer not getting recognized or your wifi breaking randomly it's so much easier looking for a solution (either googling or through a forum) if you know to look for "Ubuntu 22.04. Realtek RTL8811CU wifi dongle" than "linux wlan not working" - Spend the $50 for a spare hard drive and make regular backups. There's loads of guides on optimal backup strategies, but even just making a copy of your home partition every month (I personally use freefilesync but there's loads of options) will save your butt when, not if, you dd your main drive. Again, you could probably write a book about the do's and dont's of professional data redundancy, but even just a simple manual copy can be the difference between a stupid mistake and a weekend-long exercise in frustration
Regarding that last point, what if your home directory is on the secondary hard drive (like Nick suggested in this video)? Would it still make sense to make backups of the home directory on that hard drive? To elaborate: The primary hard drive is smaller, so it's dedicated to root (the currently installed distro).
@@NawidN That's actually my personal setup: A small SSD for root, and a larger hard drive for home. I generally just backup my home partition because I'm running fairly stock Arch (meaning if I've got a package list [e.g. "pacman -Qe > /home/yourname/packages.txt"] reinstalling is often just as simple as restoring a backup of your root partition), and so far the one time I actually had a drive fail catastrophically I just swapped in the backup HDD, fixed the fstab (i.e. updating the UUID to point to the backup disk) and it booted practically as if nothing was wrong. TL;DR: Since most of your personal data is (assumedly) in /home, that should be the top priority to backup. Again, there's loads of more in-depth guides on how to properly backup and secure your data; my point was just that while it's easy to get overwhelmed with options, having even just a spare drive is better than nothing.
@@LordHonkInc I understand, but what I'm saying is, what if /home and the backups of /home are both on the same drive (the secondary drive)? I always thought that when an issue occurs with /home that would warrant a backup, often (in most cases) it also affects the drive that /home is on. I'm not sure how to deal with this "all eggs in one basket" problem. Keeping /home on the primary drive would reintroduce the problem of being confined to too little disk space. Moving /home to an external hard drive would make what was an automatic process manual, as I would have to reattach the drive to make the backup.
@@NawidN Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, in that case you're right, having a backup on the same hard drive is unlikely to help (I mean, it'll save you if you accidentally delete a file, but if the hard drive itself breaks then… yeah). My initial comment was to spend the money to get an _additional_ hard drive just for backups; sure, it costs money, but considering that some hard drives cost less than a AAA game it's not an egregious expense, y'know. I can see how it would be inconvenient to do backups manually with an external hard drive, but that would still be better than nothing. Just do it, like, once a month, and I'd say that's still very little work for the benefit of losing at most a month's worth of data, instead of all of it. That said, if you're using a regular tower-style PC (as opposed to a laptop), I would wager you've got a spare SATA connection on your motherboard for an additional hard drive. Again, it won't save you in case of a "my entire PC burnt down" situation, but it _is_ an option. I'm sorry I can't give you the perfect solution to your specific use case, but I'd say, again, that even a sub-optimal backup plan is better than none at all. My next recommendation would be to look for some more professional solutions (there's bunches of articles on different avenues floating around online); I'm just a nerd on youtube trying to be as helpful as the comment section allows xD
My experience has been that as a repair technician, I want to stay familiar with as many distros as possible. So I run Arch on my desktop, Fedora on the laptop, & I put Ubuntu on my system at work (plus on a Surface Go 2 tablet). Overtime I have come to appreciate the differences between the different DE's & package managers (I'm a big apt & dnf fan now tbh). I even got us setup for using Rsync with a GUI so my Windows techs can leverage it without much fuss. More and more I find myself using terminal to do what I need. Shout out to the fish shell for being my new love, lol.
I'll say my most recent mistake was using the Steam Deck's touch screen to set my terminal password. If you have yet to use it, let's just say it definitely was not made with typing in mind. Pressing a key doesn't always press a key. Some of the characters I intended to be in the password didn't get in there, and I'm not advanced enough to properly do the whole, mount it as writable on a live cd and edit the shadow files and all that, even following a guide with a different distro's commands. So in the end, I ended up wiping and rebuilding SteamOS from the recovery options. The first few days of customization gone, but now I can use the terminal and do so much more.
That internet thing is the result of adopting internet early. My folks didn't have internet until 2005, but when we got internet we got what was broadband at the time. I now have 1GB FTTH, HDTV and a phone for less than most of my friends payed for internet back in the late 90's. I personally never understood this idea of adopting tech early. Most early tech sucks. There are a few exceptions, like cassets, CDs, DVDs, HDDVD... whistles nonchalantly, but a lot of other tech is really not ready when it launches. Especially not internet and Wi-FI stuff. Hell, half of the wireless routers sold today are half or more snake oil since they don't make use of actual standards but of proposals. You need to wait one or two years after a Wi-Fi standard launches to actually be able to get a good router using that standard. That all being said, I think I still have the original OpenSUSe disk I burned in 2005.
Regarding WiFi, it's so true. In 2021 I bought a WiFi 6 router when 6E was already out, but they were so much more expensive. And WiFi 7 is coming out any moment now.
@@raresmacovei8382 It's both not and is. Most Wi-Fi 7 devices that will come out will be based on the proposal, by the time the first actually standard based routers are out, those Wi-Fi 7 original routers will be a year or two old, and most likely not make use of most Wi-Fi7 features. The same way, the first year and a half of N routers didn't have full N support, the same way wi-fi 6 routers can be divided into, based on the proposed ac standard, based on the standard, and wi-fi 6E routers based on the revision to the standard. Wi-fi routers can be such a scam.
When I switched to KDE, the dropdown terminal made the command line so much easier to access that I found myself using that to install packages instead of the GUI almost immediately
10:50 I guess you could try GPU passthrough to a Windows VM for near-native performance. Not something I've done myself, but if you have iGPU and dGPU then it's an option.
Having the option to use Windows is definitely a crutch, or at least it can be. There is actual software I have to use Windows for since there literally are no Linux alternatives (yet...), but this is gonna hold you back a lot. I'm happy I am over this hump of using it as a crutch now and I basically don't boot Windows for weeks on end nowadays. Billy G probably thinks I died
Thanks for another great video. It made me think of a lot of forgotten stuff 😄 I actually had issues with modern laptops, without Ethernet, when WiFi drivers didn't come with the install. I had to manually download, move and install those via USB as recent as 2-3 years ago. I learned the thing with partitioning from freedompenguin (not the name anymore), but that was awesome! Made distrohopping much easier! I learned quite early, so I had fun reinstalling systems, because I liked doing it - I felt pretty cool installing the system from scratch. And in that regard, I think I kind of fell into the same trap. I did distros hop a lot, but always within Debian based distros, and a lot of ubuntu derivatives. Once I got an extra computer, I tried my hands on fedora and Manjaro (and puppy), but other than that, I have mostly stayed in the Debian branch. I think because I feel comfortable with a lot of the tools, and I have less time for learning now, than I did then. Guess I stayed and stay within my comfort zone on that one. Especially because I don't have a spare computer to test it on and learn it on for now. Initially I only ran Linux since I had gotten my hands on a wiped PC with no system, so I only ran ubuntu until I figured out to get windows on it. Then I dual booted with mint for a while until I got an old spare that in used to test a lot of stuff on. The last 4 years or so, I have used Linux exclusively on my private machine and windows on my work laptop. One thing I am very happy I did, was that in used Foss long before I made the switch, as I did not have money for software, so the jump was easy. And since then, I always look to see if there is a Foss alternative to the piece of software I am presented with when I have a need, as I love the concept. In terms of the terminal, I am quite limited, but with the stuff i do know how to do in there, I prefer to so in there. It is just easier in a way, because you can use the same interface for a lot of stuff, and that is very easy to navigate. I always wanted to code, so the terminal was quite intriguing to me. Found out the annoying way that I could ruin my system with that - I think I uninstalled python while running regolith. That just removed everything and I had to reinstall 😄
Going into hibernate while the updater was replacing the kernel images was fun. Also better check paths for spaces, especially when passing them to sudo rm - r... Linux is full of spontaneous learning opportunities
Biggest mistake: Marking a bunch of stuff in Synaptic for Permanent Removal without knowing what I was doing and hosing my desktop so I was left with just the terminal and no knowledge or means to recover. Oh, and I never remember to put home in a partition. Aside from that, cutting the cord from Windows was the best. I dual-booted and VM'd for a while but with the advent of Windows 10, I couldn't stand to be in thrall of Microsoft any more. I don't own a Windows machine, nor will I ever again... it annoys me that I have to use one for my job, but as long as I don't have to pay for it or link it to any of my personal accounts, I'm happy.
Every sympathy! Although I do remember the Ubuntu server I set up for a project at work where I insisted it would be headless and purely CLI, so my junior and I put up with it for several days before I gave in and said 'ok let's stick a gui on this thing'. Pretty much as simple as sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop - one command to get a whole windowing system! It was bliss!
A nice walk down the memory lane :') I once managed to remove the login screen while setting up ubuntu with KDE back in 2011... was forced to learn about the tty terminal the hard way. But at least in the end (after deleting almost 500 GB data, recovering it back with testdisk and a few sleepless nights of further fixes) the KDE desktop looked amazing.
Many of them really hit close to home. I once had to install Wifi drivers, and getting all the packages and dependencies was just a nightmare. And dual-booting to long and reinstalling Grub every two days was basically the same mistake for me.
Thank you so much for making this video. It's my first time hopping to Linux (I chose Fedora) from Windows and sometimes it can be very frustrating (and even maddening) when you just want to download a program or play a game with friends, and it doesn't work, or it takes a lot of time and effort to make it work. I don't mind it, I like to research and learn to do stuff, plus I like the idea that you can fully customize your PC and not have to deal so much with performance problems or BLOAT, but sometimes I just want/need to use my PC and there's too much trouble in the way. Linux certainly makes the user more involved with their PCs, in my experience. Also, I have a lot of respect for people who not only prompts to like their videos, but also asks you to dislike if you didn't like them. I appreciate your honesty. Thanks again!
Well, I actually wanted to partition my SSD and have all my files on an extra partition just like on my Windows machine so that I could easily replace the OS behind if Linux failed. Turned out the installer was too hard for me/I was too stupid for the installer. I wanted to partition the drive, but it wouldn't let me continue (it was missing some parts and was not telling what it missed). When I tried to copy the setup it would use by default I was able to install it, but not able to boot into the OS.
Tried Redhat back in '99 or 2000 and my first mistake was not giving it a proper chance. Second try and failure was in 2003 when Windows could only see 128GB (or something because BIOS) of my HDD, but the Linux installer could see the rest. I told Linux to install on the leftover space and it wiped the entire drive. Third mistake was not backing up all my projects and files beforehand. Linux has come a long way though, and for a while even had better default drivers than Windows. On one new computer I set up Ubuntu could use the wifi and proper screen resolution, while Windows used a lower resolution and no wifi until I got drivers.
I only installed Linux (Ubuntu) a few months ago and I've yet to return to Windows even once (even though I have it partitioned). I'm loving the experience and the gnome desktop environment. I wonder however if I should experiment with something else like Manjaro just to give other desktop environments a shot and having flatpack as an option for software. I have had some subtle issues related to having an Nvidia GPU on an occasion but for the most part my system works flawlessly.
for trying the other desktops, definitely recommend starting with a VM if you can. as for flatpak, I'm sure you can install it (and the flathub repository) with apt.
If you go with Manjaro, the arch base combined with stability and user friendliness is the biggest pro, but if you just wanna try another DE and flathub you don't have to switch the distro.
what I did was install different desktop environments onto my system and then select them from the login page. at one point I was using Pop_OS and installed kde and found I liked it more, but there was some weird issues with that. Pop would bleed into kde in some interesting ways, but I couldn't get it to work 100% seamlessly, so I switched over to kde neon to try to get a more seamless experience, and it's worked pretty well. I haven't tried Manjaro long term in years, but I hear it's really good.
Manjaro KDE in a VM is certainly a great choice. Arch, KDE and stability connected in a very user friendly way :)) I just really hate their default theming, however, that's completely subjective ;)
Am guilty of: -Installing AMD Drivers on Ubuntu when just starting out and thinking i had to install them -not trying some distros because no particular reason, one of wich was fedora and now that one is my absolute favorite -tying in to the second one is using arch/arch based distros for a very long time and thinking its the best -trying to forcefully remove windows on normal harddisk just to make a way too overcomplicated dual gpu setup that virtualises it and passes one of the gpus through -ownign multiple VR headsets wich are the sole reason im not using Linux as my absolute daily driver
My mistake was not staying with Gentoo and instead doing Arch. Linux's strength is that you can pair it with whatever you want any way you want. If you want preconfigured packages go with OpenBSD.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 OpenBSD covers my security needs and laziness prevails. Next home box I install will be Gentoo though. Problem is I rarely switch hardware and I don't install new systems for the fun of it. For remote servers I think I'll probably stick with void, because OpenBSD doesn't have KVM, and updating packages is simpler and quicker than compiling and testing them. Then again, maybe one day I'll be confident enough to use Gentoo remotely. Or OpenBSD gets KVM support, then I'll stick with that for anything touching the outside world.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 2? I have 6 boxes installed and ready to use. The compiling time isn't what worries me. Actually, I'm not worried at all. I just need the time to get into it again. First time, which was 20 years ago, I had someone install it with me. I'll be going into it fresh so to speak. In the meanwhile I have videos to make, franchises to fix and prizes to win! Oh, from what I've read, isn't there some tool that shares the compiler load over a network connection? Do you know? Can you recommend?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Well, then through the powers invested in my newly acquired rank as a hacker (because I run OpenBSD as a desktop) I hereby award you the title old and experienced user of digital machines or computer wizard for short.
What's been helping me distro hop is having a second monitor on the desk, second PC under the desk, a keyboard switcher (two keyboards is too much on the desk), and two mice (easy to grab the other and quickly do something). Then I can have the second PC running trying some distro, looking up problems on my main PC, and my main PC there to get work done at any time, rather than having to reboot the distro I'm checking back to my main system. PCs are cheap on the local used market and something from ten years ago will still run modern distros fine.
I’d definitely disagree on the dual booting front. I mostly use Linux for everything I can but there are some things windows can offer which Linux just cannot and that’s why I keep it around. If something breaks on Linux I know I have another os to fix things and my VR headset which I bought before switching to Linux only works on Windows and I can’t be bothered to buy a new one right now!
@@dylon4906 Do you have an HP Reverb G2 or something. The device looks pretty awesome but I also doubt it'll ever work on Linux. The moment valve announces the Index 2 I know what I'm gonna do!
Using Linux without the internet, I mean sure it's annoying but air gapped systems exist. Not using a separate /home part, thanks! I'll consider it. Not distro hopping, so... I have a laptop that I like to run these so called experiments on. I started with Xubuntu, then ZorinOS, and then Arch. I loved arch so much I switched to it as my main on my PC and never looked back. I am considering Fedora though, because recently had issues. But I'm afraid of losing my setup. /home directory won't help much, most of my programs are on /usr. Separate /usr? Dual booting, I actually have to disagree on that one. There are simply put things that are *impossible* on Linux. Good luck playing VALORANT or any VR game on an Oculus device. As for work related (Adobe, Office), when you work in the creative industry and people *expect* you to have fully working .ps or .ai files that aren't somewhat broken on Linux, you *need* Windows. Same for Office. There are some features which you *cannot* get on LibreOffice, WPS, ONLY, etc...
You don't even need to dual boot windows, you can boot it up in a KVM virtual machine and Passthrough your GPU to it (it's basically bare metal performance without installing it on bare metal) but the process is kinda difficult and not everyone can do it. As for Valorant, you should avoid playing it anyways (I'm only saying this for Valorant) since it employs a super invasive anti-cheat that runs at 0 ring i.e. Administrator permission (which is why Valorant will never run on linux cause then their Anti-cheat would have to be integrated into the Linux kernel) and god knows what shady things that anti-cheat does, I know for a fact that it runs 24/7 even if you don't actively play Valorant.
Yup. When I have to make the full Linux plunge, my Windows partition is just going to have to get shrunk to about 300GB of NTFS or such, to hold my VR games and certain other things that just aren't reasonably possible right now. One big issue for me though is that while Proton is getting better, it's still overhead and just a little bit of extra overhead can eat like 20% of my performance, depending on the circumstances. It can be the difference of being an enjoyable experience or a frustrating headache to play.
@@yugarthsharma626 Don't you need a secondary GPU that your main system won't primarily use, to be able to passthrough anyway? But that doesn't really change anything though, if someone only dual-boots for just some games. It's not like it's going to bleed into your Linux boots, especially if you keep everything WSL-related off your Windows boot. If you're saying that people shouldn't play only Valorant because it runs admin privileges and constantly runs in the background, then that doesn't apply to just Valorant. Punkbuster, if installed, runs on every boot and doesn't pop up in the system tray. So in that sense, Valorant's anti-cheat "wins" because at least it's more honest and upfront about being there, and you can more easily turn it off whilst still keeping it installed, unlike Punkbuster. I messed with both myself, and I personally found it harder to gently turn off Punkbuster (without uninstalling) than Valorant's.
@@L7vanmatre No you can also do single GPU Passthrough, basically it'll disconnect the GPU from you host and give it to the guest but still running under a bare bones Linux kernel (without an output screen of course, unless you have integrated graphics too) I've never played Punkbuster but I don't recommend Valorant 'cause it will drive game companies into making the same invasive anti-cheat for their own games which is why anyone who cares about privacy shouldn't play Valorant, at least other popular multiplayer games run in the Userspace and not at the kernel level.
Great video, it was important to highlight mistakes you made in the process, so it can be relatable to newcomers who appear to often forget all the times we all have also screwed Windows. really great video.
Depending on your wifi card it was still sometimes necessary to attempt to install some things on arch without internet until quite recently. Main reason I did not do more experimenting with Arch on my old laptop.
I jumped in at the deep end back in 2000, when I was asked to build a website for the local hockey team. I was doing tech support of Windows machines for a large government department, but a friend at work got me interested in this new(ish) O/S called Linux. Cut my teeth on Slackware, back in the days when it didn't come with a GUI environment. I built up a LAMP server using PHP, Apache, and MySQL, dusted off my SQL skils and taught myself PHP. I can still remember the countless re-compiles of the kernel. I built and administered 5 websites for several years before I retired from the hockey club. I've been using Linux exclusively on my laptop since 2005. I've played with Slackware, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, and settled on Zorin (although I'm checking out Pop! OS)
The only thing I look back with horror in my eyes is not making/having backups. It is soooo comfortable knowing that I can burn my PC to the ground and next day I can be back to running on a different machine.
Also... I started with SuSE Linux back in 1995, but there was no internet for me back then and I quickly dropped it. Until I got into programming and understood how limiting Windows without WSL really is. CLI should be mandatory for anyone, who want to have a deeper understanding of Linux. I use it frequently on any OS, but I also like e.g. Cockpit for managing my server, Portainer for managing Docker stuff etc. The advantage is, that I do know how to do most of the stuff by hand using the CLI, but I prefer not to. I've have done almost every mistake you named and some of them were very annoying (e.g. overwriting EFI Boot or MBR with Windows and having to recover from it, dual booting for too long, disregarding other distros - I still do, because I don't have enough hours in my days). In the end I am glad I am savvy enough to install, configure and maintain my Linux Server and I wouldn't want it any other way (it's much faster than it was when I had Windows Server installed over there and I usually don't have to ask myself what the hell is chewing on the RAM or CPU). Great video, keep it up. You're my No.1 Linux channel guy 😊.
Good video. I also avoided the command line like the plague for the longest time. Now I am always looking for a command - why install more software if there is a command already there? Ironically the command line was more needed back 10 years when I first started learning Linux. With gaming now better and better, there is really fewer and fewer reasons to not use Linux, and a lot of good reasons to do so. You own your own computer, you can customize the experience how you want, less bloat and no ads in the software itself.
I followed a random article and modified the grub loader. After the restart the PC was unusable. I had to chroot and set the default grub. Now i do these experiments in VM than in my PC.
After hearing the reasoning, I paused the video and made a new /home partition and moved everything accordingly. I never thought of how your settings will follow distro hops.
11:41 I think the man problem with the Linux terminal is that for every command, it seems you have to read 100 pages of description, even if you just want to user it's basic function. If you type a command on the cmd.exe of Windows with the /? parameter, you usually get a very brief description on what it does. If you type in a command on Linux with the -h parameter, you get like 100 pages worth of text that you might have to read all before you find the parameter you need. Why not start with a short summary of 1 or 2 pages and then have the long version after that? If people need to get work done, they can't spend an hour reading a documentation before, so people might instead just use the GUI even in cases in which it is kess efficient.
I accidentally erased my HDD MULTIPLE times and had to restore my most important documents from Dropbox. These days I'm full-time Windows and only interact with Linux through WSL, but I still love watching Linux content.
In my case, was two things: 1) Try to install every lib I found in synaptics (starting with debian) 2) Try to enable every driver in the kernel (starting with gentoo, after some time with debian)
My worst mistakes: Wiping the wrong disks, reformatting a drive I accidentally formatted to FAT32 and didn’t realise back to ext4 and forgetting to change fstab, forgetting basically every important package whilst installing arch, not using the terminal early enough, sticking to long to a userfriendly distro instead of a usercentric one, using flatpak and snap apps even though they all were in the AUR and using an AUR helper
gaming on linux and proton has come so far that Linux can legitimately be your main os even if you're a gamer these days. especially if you're someone like me who mostly plays single player games anyways. I think there are still just enough games that don't run great on Windows for me to keep it but it's viable for a lot of people now
Wow this video brought back so many horrible memories of my first failed Linux attempt around 2005 era Ubuntu craze. As soon as I would get the correct working drivers for my XFX overclocked Nvidia 8600 GT card OS updates would break it all over again and the search would begin AGAIN!!!!! Driver hell was the biggest hurdle back then so I eventually went back to Windows especially as a hardcore gamer. It's great that it was updated frequently but that also meant things were breaking frequently. It was a very fun experience but Linux just wasn't ready yet. Glad to say partly because of some of the info found on this channel I'm now happily running and loving Mint Cinnamon. Great content, and thank you.
Great video as always. Honestly, I haven't been on Linux long enough to make any really harsh mistakes, or maybe I have and just can't see them yet. I did feel your comment about not distro-hopping enough though. That certainly applies to me. I switched "exclusively" to Linux about 1½ years ago. I have been comfortable on Manjaro ever since. I put the quotation marks there because after having been on Linux for 8 or so months I started studying .NET-development and decided that since the school was all in on Microsoft ecosystem I would do best to get a laptop with Windows on it to go along with my Linux-machine. I am planning to install Fedora on the laptop as a sort of graduation ceremony once I finish school though! :) Keep up the good work!
I don't mind the Terminal, has a nostalgic feel for me personally as it conjures up memories of DOS days as a kid - though not the bit where i couldn't spell yet and not load programs effectively...
My first mistake was trying to install programs the Windows way i.e. searching the Internet for installer files. Didn't take me long to figure out what I was doing wrong, though.
Hmmm. My mistakes: 1) A decade ago I broke Ubuntu a few times by installing things that had dependency conflicts and not realizing that forcing it would just break everything. (apt actually warns you nowadays, but IIRC it was pretty cryptic then by just just saying it would need to replace some libraries) 2) An embarrassingly recent mistake was when I experimented with alternative kernels. After finding no measurable difference in my use case, I uninstalled the kernel entirely when I meant to switch back to the normal one. It gave me a EXTREMELY clear warning that my machine would not boot if I proceeded. I though "Gosh! That's not what I want to do", then proceeded anyway because my muscle memory required me to accept every such prompt I've ever been given. (facepalm) 3) Relying too much on the command line. Not a mistake per se. I've been quite comfortable with un*x CLI stuff for a couple decades. It was necessary a long time ago, but now it isn't really. Particularly with the super polished Gnome style apps, I'm finding there to be a nice influx of purpose driven GUI apps I've been ignoring simply out of habit. 4) Not keeping a dedicated Linux machine around. Though Linux was my first Unix experience, once OS X came out I was quite happy with that to fill my desktop Unix needs. Linux mostly was run on low powered hardware or in VMs as needed. As OS X atrophied into a locked down tablet OS and Linux DEs grew up, I missed the point in time where I could have been quite happy running something like Gnome 3 instead.
Back in days I do remember RedHat was supplied on 6CDs as well as Debian, Mandriva or Slackware. Ubuntu was probably the only distro at that time which didn't have full package repos available from the CDs, and only supplied installer CD (for free though). I do remember how RedHat and Mandriva was asking to insert CD #4 for installing some weird app I selected and that was alright for offline usage, apart from the fact that you needed to download the whole 6 goddamn ISO files.
My biggest mistake was not actually using Linux! I discovered that Linux is getting good now around the start of 2019 after I got my new PC, and as I was a long time Windows power user I had enough knowledge and experience to be completely fed up with it so I tried Linux. But I never actually sticked to Linux for any long time, I just had a cycle of getting fed up with Windows, reinstalling Linux, configuring it, tinkering, and trying all the things out for a few days, and eventually just getting tired and switching back to Windows. But recently - just last month, I got fed up with Windows once again and installed Fedora Linux. Not really sure if anything was much different this time, but I just began to use it and simply loved the experience, it's simply working and the workflow is much smoother than in Windows. Several days after Windows stopped booting after a reboot when I wanted to check it, and I was too lazy to reinstall it, and I actually went on to use Linux without working Windows install. Now, after almost a month of using Linux continuously - I just can't use Windows, it feels so terrible in comparison. I did look back to think if Windows might still be better for me, after all I am a game developer and Windows is supported more, but even still - Linux felt better (primarily because of development, it sucked on Windows).
Linux is a BELOVED hobby of mine and in the first 2 weeks on Linux, the CONSTANT need to enter my password and not being able to do hardly anything because I didn't understand permissions caused me to do a recursive command to change the permissions in every file in every folder on my system so any user could access without sudo. COMPLETELY destroyed my Linux Mint install (back when they offered KDE Plasma).
Back in 1995 I installed Coherent (Linux wannabe). It took a week and hours and hours of researching monitors and video cards. When I had it running, I left for lunch and when I came back a core-dump was showing on my screen. YIKES! I had selected a screensaver called "BSOD" (Blue Screen Of Death) and it had kicked in. Nearly had a heart attack. After that was Red Hat before they went commercial. So much easier. Thanks for your 'casts. Keep 'em coming.
MAN! That Gnome 2 UI takes me back! I started with Feisty Fawn, I think it was? 2006? 2007? The good old days! Back when we had those cool Compiz effects. I had the cube, and gratuitous amounts of fire. Haha. Things were simple and fun back then.
Probably not my biggest mistake, but one I certainly felt, was not rebuilding my grub bootloader when I removed my windows dual boot from my laptop. To make matters worse, the laptop has a firmware os recovery system, which took a look at what I'd done, wiped the partition table, and told me to reinstall windows. It took over 5 hours for me to repair the damage, though half of that was just trying to get a working bootable USB drive, since the one I had been using stopped being recognised by the uefi.
Yes, it's really annoying that vendors try to force Windows on you. i think you can still disable this "feature" in the BIOS setup, but many people don't even know about this.
That brought some suppressed memories back. I successfully forgot what a nightmare Linux without the internet was. Oh boy, how I longed for a router in those days!
I usually opt not to have a separate home partition just so I don't have my storage space fragmented into multiple pieces. I don't want to accidentally have my / partition full while my home one has plenty of space, or visa versa.
I use multiple computers with multiple OSes and reinstall everything frequently, so I usually store data on a separate drive (not home partition). I also sync everything via nextcloud (on my own server). Potentially, this is not very safe: if my nextcloud is hacked, they can steal all my data (however, I don’t think that anyone really needs my data) but it is very convenient. Also, very important note - synchronization is not a backup!
Flatpacks are awesome and I discovered them thanks to you! Dualbooting might be required sometimes though, I for one use industrial software very resource hungry, but then I do everything else on ubuntu
Regarding the home partition. Nowadays it's probably not necessary if you are using a dotfile manager and backing up your personal home files properly. Not that you can't still do it but then you have to know what size you want to have your partitions.
The worst mistake, that I was doing over and over again was just copying commands form the internet without thinking or examining them, what they are doing and then things broke very often. I think this is the major mistake, what linux begginers doing and it's really important to understand, what every command does!
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I kinda agree with setting up a separate home drive, but must admit I gave up out of laziness some time back. I have basically had a single partition consistently for a greater part of 10 years! Frankly, I have not really broken my system in almost five to six years, and that speaks to how much Linux has polished its implementation across distros. But I used to have a separate drive, and I have to admit it was primarily so I could f@#$g distro hop! :-P I think I have pretty much tasted them all, and settled on Pop for a while. Had to move back to Ubuntu, even though I didn't want to given my general distaste for Canonical, when the screen brightness control regression popped back up with Nvidia driver version 465.xx. It's still not been resolved, as a quick search on Nvidia developer forums would attest, and Ubuntu still has the serve 450.xx drivers in the repo!
Have u tried installing VLC via flatpak on zorin os? Video effects (brightness, saturation etc.. has a bug and crashes)
You should know there are people who see you but don't have internet access, so your videos really reach more audience than what RUclips knows. I used to watch a lot of content without even knowing what felt like seen the subscribe button everyone talked about or the famous "Google search".
So, YES, YOUR PIECES OF ADVICE for not using linux without internet are not outdated, they are useful, THANKS
I started with debian in 1998, I totally understand your point about internet being essential. I did manage to get Wolfeinstien :ET and Tremulous working well with graphics acceleration though :)
@@CrisisDigital LOL the funny part is I never have had those options work together with the rotate option on all videos, unless I was using videos. I suggest you try mpv or smplayer, they work great for me.
It's insane how much easier the out of box experience is these days. My first exposure was a Mandrake Linux CD-ROM I got from a friend in the early 2000's. I had no internet and no idea what I was doing. Fast forward a few years later and I too was struggling with ndiswrapper and getting my sound card working. Now I just install Fedora on my modern laptop and everything "just works", there's a modern(ish) app store with Flatpaks, and gaming has even viable.
Oh yeah, things are so much better nowadays!
I honestly had to chuckle when that point was raised. I installed my first Linux (SuSE) in the early 90s as a young teenager (on a x386 or x486). No CD ... 3.5" floppy disks. Many floppy disks. Very, very many floppy disks.
Which also meant that a) I needed to learn and understand from the get-go how to partition a hard disk AND have two OSs. Obviously, I also had to use the command line instead of GUI.
The thing I don't do very much is "distro-hopping". I usually rather try and figure out a work-around by using the terminal (or TTY) ... which is sometimes frustrating because most Howtos either tell you which (near enough) GUI App you can use OR are entire command line sequences without any solid explanation what every command line exactly does/ means.
I've got the impression Linux is diverting somewhat into a group which easily can work everything using the "man" command and another group needing YT videos. And both groups frown upon one-another.
You just described my experince with Linux, to the letter 👍😁
Damn, this week I installed Arch Linux GUI on my uni desktop and everything worked fine! It's a basic AIO we use for web browsing and some light programming and I can frequently update it.
It might have gotten better, but it isn't near the "it just works" definition.
Installed Fedora 35 a couple of months ago...couldn't get almost anything I wanted to run.
Hey nick, this is everyone
Hey this, everyone is Nick
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Hey Nick, is this everyone?
Hey this is Nick, everyone.
1. Deleting the home folder
Hahaha yeah that one hurts
Once I deleted the ~/.config folder
@@groos3449 oh, the pain...
This reminds me of when I had a dual boot of Windows 98SE and Windows 2000. I nuked and was going to reinstall both (or maybe 2000, I don't remember). What I do remember is backing up the C:\My Documents folder, completely forgetting that most of my documents were in different spot in Windows 2000 and since I was backing up far more than just this folder, I backed up my stuff overnight. and didn't realize I didn't have my files until after I had formatted and reinstalled. Yep, I feel your pain.
@@FFVison C:\My Documents ! Oh the nostalgia! Whenever someone harps on about how the 90s were a better time I'll remind them of the days of C:\My Documents .
Seeing the hoops you had to jump through back in the day to use Linux gave me a new appreciation for the internet and for how far Linux has come over the years. I can totally see where Linux's reputation of being too hard for most people comes from. The fresh install experience is a lot nicer now compared to only a few years ago.
Absolutely!
If you have some software that only supplies source code and has a basic website with very little information, in my opinion, that is not very professional.
That’s fine for people who have experience with Linux but it is not appropriate for the general user.
Fortunately, a lot of software is available in the store of your distribution. Some software, such as LibreOffice is available as DEB files or RPM files.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Yeah, but most people _don't_ have the time or willing to do that.
to me arch wasnt difficult to install i just followed the archwiki and a videoguide and now im happy with my distro and i will continue to rice it
wine is a gift from heaven.
@@angryteapod1765 So, you use Arch BtW ?
I think your biggest mistake was not using Linux From Scratch as your first distro instead of Ubuntu.
Hahaha I would probably never have used Linux ever again 😅
@@nxllpointer Garuda is horrible. It's just bloated Arch
@@gtPacheko I don't want to agree with you because it looks nice, but I have to agree that it feels bloated af. Oh also it broke like, 15 times on me, reinstalling it for the 16th time I decided to nuke it and install something else.
@@gtPacheko there was a time when it wasnt so bloated :(
You're a very strange person. That's a bit like telling a student physicist 'I think the first job you should go for is head of the Nuclear Fusion programme at CERN. 😀
I partially disagree with the "keep $HOME on a separate partition". Using the same home directory with different distros could cause configuration conflicts since different distros could contain different versions of the same program or subsystem, just like installing KDE on a Gnome system causing problems.
That said, I always keep my personal files on partitions other than the system partition, but I did that on Windows, too.
Yes in fact when i do that I move all my dot file and folder to a backup folder, then restore them one by one carefully.
Nowadays many distro's keep a home subvol (in btrfs/zfs) so it is easier to keep snapshots and backup. Also you can use linked subvol with conflicting deleted on multiboot systems.
Yeah, I like to keep my $HOME clean so I wouldn't want to have all kinds of config files from different OSs and DEs in one place. I back up my personal files on a separate disk, this way I have redundancy and if I install a new distro I just copy the files. It takes some time but it's no big deal. And as for configuration, I keep crucial dotfiles in Github and for things like the browser I just accept there'll be some things to click through.
I just delete all dot files (except browsers) before installing other linux distros.
I just change the name of my old folder to something random (eg. /home/abcdef), then install the new distro with the correct name, then copy the files from abcdef to the new folder, and tell it to skip the conflicting files & folders.
I first started with Linux back in 1995 or so. At the time, I was running OS/2 Warp as a primary desktop OS, but needed to work with an odd programming language for a compiler class (SML/NJ). The current version of that compiler was very old for OS/2, so my choice was to either install Linux and the current version at home, or drive back to campus every night to do my homework.
So, my first install was Slackware 3.0 (something like 15-20 floppy disk images). This was before the era of kernel modules. So, if you wanted your sound card or video card to work, you had to redo your config and recompile your kernel. And then there was diddling with my XF86 config files to make sure the monitor frequencies were all set correctly.
You kids get off my lawn.
OS/2 Warp! Now that's an OS you don't hear mentioned much now a days.
That's a great story my friend Gnu/Linux is much easier these days and yet people still complain and get scared of bash
Same here. Slackware on floppies.
Kernel 0.9-something..
One thing I did was trying to replicate windows as much: avoiding GNOME and other DE's that could not set me up with start menu on the left and clock on the right, ricing the desktop to imitate windows 10, even messing with /etc/fstab so I could "simulate" having C: and D: drives.
the only thing I carry on from windows is coloring my system monitors in the same color as task manager graphs (blue CPU, purple RAM, green Disk, etc). It is just so I can know at a glance what that means without labels.
Another one : trying to continue using all my previous Windows program with Wine ....
i never paid much attention* to the graph coloring on Windows yet still (somewhat) subconsciously imitated that by making my CPU graph teal and my RAM graph pink (not exact colors, but very close)
I pretty much did that when I moved over to Linux was making it "look" like Windows (been using it sporadically for 20 years, but only moved over 18 months ago). Its one of the great things about Linux is you can make it look how you like - you can make it "look and feel" like Windows without the Windows annoyance. Colours, task manager placement, cursors, icons, folder colours etc. Which is great when you're first moving over so you feel more at home. These days I don't worry too much about how it looks - except removing the baby poo green colours from Manjaro 😂🤣.
I don't use a separate /Home partition, but I also enjoy the process of going through all my stuff and setting up a fresh system install. I see it a bit like spring cleaning. A fresh install. A fresh start. The important stuff is backed up of course.
Seriously, distrohopping is a necessary "evil". Evil because you feel like you waste your time into moving through other systems and reconfiguring the whole thing. But with that, I learned how to create my dotfiles and simplify most of the configuration. Bonus points with using Nix+home-manager, that helped even more. And as Nick said, you learn about other systems. Or you could try using a VM, but the experience of configuring physical hardware was more enriching for me, because that's how I learned to be way more cautious when using CLI disk managing tools.n
To be fair distro hopping is much, much easier today than it was 8 years ago.
Internet is faster overall so it doesn't take forever to download something (that you may need to download again if connection falls)
There are videos everywhere to show if it is worth your time.
And then there is Ventoy, you can just drag it to a pendrive and check it out. No need to wait ten to thirty minutes booting a flashdrive and hope it works out.
i've been scared of distro hopping because i really dislike losing things, my internet is horrible so having to download so many things again would be a nightmare.
Yes, i agree. I stuck with Ubuntu for 15 years, but after the snap packs issues i started distro hopping. Wow what a big difference when you find distros that are working fast and easy.
I have a lot of fun reinstalling the system and configuring it trying new themes and such
It's fun
Probably my biggest mistake when I started using Linux was to remove Python from my Ubuntu 9.10 system. Since I hade recently learned C and developed a superiority complex against Python and thought that my system should be clean of such a horrible language, so I removed it without realizing that Gnome 2 partially depended on it so I nuked the desktop without realizing it. At the time I was not very proficient in the terminal so I ended up reinstalling the system (and I did not at the time have a separate partition for my home directory so I lost all my data).
Other than that I think rising the shit out of a Linux system was a pretty big noob mistake that I did. Don't get me wrong, one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that you can make your system look and behave exactly as you want it, but if you just are starting out with Linux you might be tempted to follow some random guide on the internet to make your system look in certain way and destroying it in the process, and that might discourage you from keep using Linux. Instead I think one should take it slow maybe do one small thing at a time and learn how different programs works. Also I have found over the years that for the most parts the default settings often works best; after all they where chosen by someone that understands the program way better than you could without spending a lot of time studding the source code.
In short, Linux gives you freedom under responsibility.
Nuking python seems like such a strange thing to me. I get the flawed reasoning, but god that would have made things inordinately challenging for no real reason!
@@TheXipherZero I once did that when I was new to linux (used zorin) and wanted to update python. So I installed the new python and then uninstalled the old one... Even the tty didn't work anymore. Good thing I have a friend who taught me that you can use live systems to fix systems
@@TheXipherZero I had only been using Linux for about a year at that time and didn't know anything about how it works. But as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20
I made this exact mistake too. I didn't realize how many programs and parts of my system used it!
Ubuntu uses Python 2.xx in its scripts. I found this the hard way when I too uninstalled Python 2.x after installing Python 3.xx :-)
There were times in my life when I literally brought the Internet on a flash drive. In my parents' house, the natural disaster damaged the communication lines for several weeks. Mobile Internet in that area works very poorly. So I downloaded videos and brought them on a flash drive.
This practice is still common in some remote cities, where the Internet works only via satellite, which is why it is too expensive. So people bring content on physical media and share it through the city's local area network. The situation is similar in some countries where ordinary citizens do not have access to the Internet for various reasons. But they can still watch videos brought by someone on physical media.
There are also distributions where installation of software from the Internet is not provided. For example, Elbrus OS (for Russian processors of the same name). It uses apt, but no remote repositories (adding third-party repositories will most likely break the system). But this is normal, given that this is a specialized system not for a wide range of users (which does not prevent you from downloading the x86-64 version for testing).
But in general, you are right - it is difficult to use Linux without the Internet in most cases.
That's remind me to my daily life 6 years ago. I had to leaf my village to download videos and come back to watch it because there's only satellite internet and that was too expensive for us. But I have to say that the Internet development in our country dramatically accelerate since the government invest into it. It still a sadly truth that our government needs up to 2019 to realize how important the Internet is and that they need a pandemic, too, to realize that DSL is not enough and we need glas fiber. I mean, Germany has the money at least…
2:05 Dude 🤣 That delivery is perfect! I freaking love your humor!! How do you come up with this stuff!
I'm just nuts 🤣
@@TheLinuxEXP Never change, please 🙂
I am new to linux, and just today I created my separate home partition (after this video). Using Fedora 36 from less than a month and I am enjoying every bit of it.
Fedora is a very good operating system I used it but I needed more stable software so I moved to Manjaro.
@@hyperio546 Btw is use arch
Welcome
My biggest mistake was buying a book about Ubuntu after I had downloaded Ubuntu !
Nothing worked as written in the book and I could not understand it and left Ubuntu and Linux :(
A few years later I tried installing Linux Mint ( without any books) and everything worked great and I got hooked on Linux :)
I then found out that the book I had bought described the PREVIOUS version of Ubuntu and the new version was had a completely different GUI ...
A typical beginners mistake although the author of the book SHOULD have written the version, he was describing and should have shown how to check the version. That would have save me a lot of time ...
Regards from Denmark
What version of Ubuntu was this I'm curious. Was this when Ubuntu dropped unity?
I did the same, but the book worked really for me well since it came with an Ubuntu 8.04 CD as well. I still have both, though the CD is probably uber scratched now.
I dont use a separate partition for home but instead use a separate subvolume in BTRFS as it means i dont have to worry about filling either partition. Sure a separate partition could prevent data loss (if i didnt have a backup) if the filesystem went corrupt but the odds of that are low and if the parition went corrupt odds are it took my other partitions with it too.
When reinstalling i can just delete the other subvolumes and recreate them.
The problem with distro hopping is the same with switching to Linux in general: You have to re-setup your workspace and learn the things you already knew all over again. And that for no other reason than _oh look, this looks even more shiny_ . Switching to Linux is sooo much work if you are used to a different OS. The act of changing your entire OS is not a _20 Minutes Adventure_ .
"You don't learn anything new" is also not really a good argument for somebody who needs their PC to be reliable because it's their _bread and butter_ machine that is used for work. If the system fails they could no longer work and have an income. And us tech nerds have to accept that most computer end users are just that: end users. As long as it works it's perfectly fine. (Yes, we have to educate ourselves and check out what's new so we can tell the non-tech nerds - I for my part outsource that part to you, Nick)
As Anthony from Linus tech Tips put it: You end up picking the distro with the default settings that seem most sane to you and tweak it to your liking.
I used to use windows primarily, but I used the Ubuntu live cd many times to rescue files work files and family member's files from their computer. Over the years I spent a lot of time trying to reinstall programs I no longer had the install media for or had to always worry about install keys, etc (on windows). I always purchased legitimate windows, office, visual studio, mssql. (some were student editions as a student) The builtin backups were harder in windows, networking more complicated, etc. Switching completely to linux for me wasn't as much work as windows upkeep. But yeah, switching for no reason from distro to distro is a pain if you don't have to.
I beg to differ
While Anthony is a tech god for many people, I use Arch (btw) and there are no default settings xD
Installing and setting something as easy as Manjaro actually IS a "20 Minutes Adventure" - if you know what you're doing
I actually think that the approach of "end users" is completely wrong and companies like Apple, making money on dummies, shouldn't even exist
Everyone should know what they're doing and shouldn't be allowed to connect to the internet without knowing at least some basic principles.
It's safer both for them and for the others.
I dont think you really have to learn 'everything' again. Most distros have a main desktop like KDE or GNOME and then preselect the packages they feel make it work best. The only real big difference might be the package managers used.
@@mhavock yea
Since I use only Arch-based distros, I always have to install yay xD
@@Get-Rekt LOL no, seriously why would you gatekeep using a PC? There are millions of people who live fulfilling lives without being good at any sort of tech whatsoever but regularity interact with Apple or Linux/Windows PCs, elitism gets us nowhere.
The only mistake that I made was fearing the terminal which lasted about first 4 or 5 months
It definitely can be scary at first!
i have been doing that for years .
when i need to install a software i try to find deb files and install . if it had any dependencies so that software didn't work i simply stop trying to install that instead of installing from package manager .
now i try to do most things from terminal.
@@vaishakhgk2006 When Im in Ubuntu land and have to deal with deb packages I tend to rely pretty heavily on gdebi to deal with dependency resolution. I learned early on to avoid dep hell at all costs.
# sudo apt install gdebi-core (Gets you the cli gdebi utility)
# sudo gdebi to install the package with dependency resolution.
@@TheLinuxEXP It's easy once you figure out how to use it though.
First experience with Linux was browsing a chain store picking up a boxed version of Linux Mandrake off the shelf. I had *no idea* what I was getting into. My thought process at the time was "Cool! a Windows alternative!" but I didn't consider that hardware support wouldn't be as mature as Windows was at the time.
Long story short, the install process (which resembled those DOS game installers of the late 80's - early 90's) didn't warn me about undetected hardware. So after that was done, I found myself with a broken X installation that tried to initialize my monitor at an out of-range resolution and refresh rate, and my Windows partition was wiped.
I also had no sound, power management didn't work, and if I tried to print a document it would spit out endless garbage pages until I unplugged the printer.🤣 The best part was that inside the box was a card offering phone support at a per-minute charge.
At the time it seemed like some kind of scam to get money via support.
Today I run Arch -- and everything works, even wireless printing and scanning (and several "Windows-only games" thanks to Proton and VKDX 😎)
We've certainly come a long way!
honestly, not distro hopping in the beginning is a good thing. as a new user its already an overwhelming experience as it is.
by staying on one distro for a few years, you can get used to the fundamentals in the world of linux. without having to relearn new things each time you try a new distro.
yes its good to explore new distros, when you are ready for it that is.
I made a mistake of installing multiple desktop environments in Ubuntu. The OS was mostly functional, but it ran in limp mode. Some programs were also broken. Nowadays you can work around broken programs by installing them as flatpaks, etc. I wouldn't recommend installing multiple DE.
Another "mistake" I made involved encrypting my home directory. Encryption works well. But, it gave me a headache when I tried to copy home directory files from one distro to another. I no longer encrypt my home directory.
I still keep a Windows install to pretend I'm a normal person.
The biggest mistake was to migrate all mission critical files (aka. music and stuff) to new ReiserFS partition somewhere in 1999, without making copy. Then I lost all data in power outage.
Ouch!
I remember my first wifi trouble with linux. My laptops had broadcom wifi module, but fedora and ubuntu didn't came with it pre-installed. So I had to connect an Ethernet cable to install driver before I could use wifi.
But of-course at that time, wifi only routers were popular choice for students like me. So I had to use my phone as usb modem, to install drivers so that I could use wifi.
Wifi was such a pain!
I did this too
@@TheLinuxEXP Some Broadcom chips are still pain in the ass to work with
My friend has a Dell Latitude with a frikken Broadcom wifi module (which, to be fair, doesn't work well even with windows) and the experience wasn't great even after installing the correct drivers.
I had to give her my TP-Link TL-WN725N USB Adapter (a really reliable one, actually. I deffinitely recommend that one :))
Also, I have a USB Adapter with a broadcom chipset and it doesn't even get detected... (and it actually works with winshit)
@@Get-Rekt Winshit?
No no no, you mean Winblows! 😂
@@cameronbosch1213 you're right, I wrote that comment before I knew xD
I've installed linux on mum's PC years ago and no more support requests after that apart for some initial configuration/explanations. I have also not distrohopped a lot. 1 year on ubuntu, 1 on manjaro and arch after that. I do not regret that as I can do whatever I want now and any further hopps would not benefit me much
I think dual booting is good only for games at this moment, due to anti-cheats but I hope soon enough there will be more support for Linux gaming with proton. It’s not a bad idea to have a windows instance strictly for games if you are a gamer.
Or if you use Adobe software (or anything else not on Linux)
Dual booting is helping with more sophisticated video editing software, the other peripheral programs that were windows only friendly are slowly getting better and better with Linux
I started using Linux after ordering that very same Ubuntu 6.06 CD in 2006. After a little distro hopping I landed on Debian. It has been my main OS since 2009.
Having said that, I agree with most of what you say, except:
1. A separate home partition was recommended for Ubuntu users many years ago, but I have never made one as I tend to stick around with whatever I have installed for a while. Instead, I made a /data partition. It would be perfect for your music, so you didn't have to rip your music so many times. ;)
2. Flatpak: They sap system space and resources. I would only use them as a last resort.
4:19 is new to me. Just switched to Linux last week and never knew about this. Thanks!
Been using that "technique" on Windows for years so that I could easily nuke the OS drive when I get a virus. lol. Never really thought about doing it as well on Linux.
Something I do all the time:
Typing dir in a bash prompt and typing ls in a DOS prompt
We've all been there and done the same mistakes, but this is the path of leaving Windows behind which is exciting!
Two of my personally hard-learned lessons:
- Know the hardware in your PC/laptop; even if you're installing a user-friendly distro like Ubuntu, if you run into a problem like your printer not getting recognized or your wifi breaking randomly it's so much easier looking for a solution (either googling or through a forum) if you know to look for "Ubuntu 22.04. Realtek RTL8811CU wifi dongle" than "linux wlan not working"
- Spend the $50 for a spare hard drive and make regular backups. There's loads of guides on optimal backup strategies, but even just making a copy of your home partition every month (I personally use freefilesync but there's loads of options) will save your butt when, not if, you dd your main drive. Again, you could probably write a book about the do's and dont's of professional data redundancy, but even just a simple manual copy can be the difference between a stupid mistake and a weekend-long exercise in frustration
Regarding that last point, what if your home directory is on the secondary hard drive (like Nick suggested in this video)? Would it still make sense to make backups of the home directory on that hard drive? To elaborate: The primary hard drive is smaller, so it's dedicated to root (the currently installed distro).
@@NawidN That's actually my personal setup: A small SSD for root, and a larger hard drive for home. I generally just backup my home partition because I'm running fairly stock Arch (meaning if I've got a package list [e.g. "pacman -Qe > /home/yourname/packages.txt"] reinstalling is often just as simple as restoring a backup of your root partition), and so far the one time I actually had a drive fail catastrophically I just swapped in the backup HDD, fixed the fstab (i.e. updating the UUID to point to the backup disk) and it booted practically as if nothing was wrong.
TL;DR: Since most of your personal data is (assumedly) in /home, that should be the top priority to backup.
Again, there's loads of more in-depth guides on how to properly backup and secure your data; my point was just that while it's easy to get overwhelmed with options, having even just a spare drive is better than nothing.
@@LordHonkInc I understand, but what I'm saying is, what if /home and the backups of /home are both on the same drive (the secondary drive)? I always thought that when an issue occurs with /home that would warrant a backup, often (in most cases) it also affects the drive that /home is on.
I'm not sure how to deal with this "all eggs in one basket" problem. Keeping /home on the primary drive would reintroduce the problem of being confined to too little disk space. Moving /home to an external hard drive would make what was an automatic process manual, as I would have to reattach the drive to make the backup.
@@NawidN Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, in that case you're right, having a backup on the same hard drive is unlikely to help (I mean, it'll save you if you accidentally delete a file, but if the hard drive itself breaks then… yeah). My initial comment was to spend the money to get an _additional_ hard drive just for backups; sure, it costs money, but considering that some hard drives cost less than a AAA game it's not an egregious expense, y'know.
I can see how it would be inconvenient to do backups manually with an external hard drive, but that would still be better than nothing. Just do it, like, once a month, and I'd say that's still very little work for the benefit of losing at most a month's worth of data, instead of all of it.
That said, if you're using a regular tower-style PC (as opposed to a laptop), I would wager you've got a spare SATA connection on your motherboard for an additional hard drive. Again, it won't save you in case of a "my entire PC burnt down" situation, but it _is_ an option.
I'm sorry I can't give you the perfect solution to your specific use case, but I'd say, again, that even a sub-optimal backup plan is better than none at all. My next recommendation would be to look for some more professional solutions (there's bunches of articles on different avenues floating around online); I'm just a nerd on youtube trying to be as helpful as the comment section allows xD
My experience has been that as a repair technician, I want to stay familiar with as many distros as possible. So I run Arch on my desktop, Fedora on the laptop, & I put Ubuntu on my system at work (plus on a Surface Go 2 tablet). Overtime I have come to appreciate the differences between the different DE's & package managers (I'm a big apt & dnf fan now tbh). I even got us setup for using Rsync with a GUI so my Windows techs can leverage it without much fuss. More and more I find myself using terminal to do what I need. Shout out to the fish shell for being my new love, lol.
I'll say my most recent mistake was using the Steam Deck's touch screen to set my terminal password. If you have yet to use it, let's just say it definitely was not made with typing in mind. Pressing a key doesn't always press a key. Some of the characters I intended to be in the password didn't get in there, and I'm not advanced enough to properly do the whole, mount it as writable on a live cd and edit the shadow files and all that, even following a guide with a different distro's commands. So in the end, I ended up wiping and rebuilding SteamOS from the recovery options. The first few days of customization gone, but now I can use the terminal and do so much more.
That internet thing is the result of adopting internet early. My folks didn't have internet until 2005, but when we got internet we got what was broadband at the time. I now have 1GB FTTH, HDTV and a phone for less than most of my friends payed for internet back in the late 90's. I personally never understood this idea of adopting tech early. Most early tech sucks. There are a few exceptions, like cassets, CDs, DVDs, HDDVD... whistles nonchalantly, but a lot of other tech is really not ready when it launches. Especially not internet and Wi-FI stuff. Hell, half of the wireless routers sold today are half or more snake oil since they don't make use of actual standards but of proposals. You need to wait one or two years after a Wi-Fi standard launches to actually be able to get a good router using that standard.
That all being said, I think I still have the original OpenSUSe disk I burned in 2005.
Regarding WiFi, it's so true. In 2021 I bought a WiFi 6 router when 6E was already out, but they were so much more expensive. And WiFi 7 is coming out any moment now.
@@raresmacovei8382 It's both not and is. Most Wi-Fi 7 devices that will come out will be based on the proposal, by the time the first actually standard based routers are out, those Wi-Fi 7 original routers will be a year or two old, and most likely not make use of most Wi-Fi7 features. The same way, the first year and a half of N routers didn't have full N support, the same way wi-fi 6 routers can be divided into, based on the proposed ac standard, based on the standard, and wi-fi 6E routers based on the revision to the standard. Wi-fi routers can be such a scam.
When I switched to KDE, the dropdown terminal made the command line so much easier to access that I found myself using that to install packages instead of the GUI almost immediately
This was a great video that highlights issues we have all faced. I appreciate the vulnerability and openness to admit to these 6 mistakes :)
10:50 I guess you could try GPU passthrough to a Windows VM for near-native performance. Not something I've done myself, but if you have iGPU and dGPU then it's an option.
I once tried updated glibc under Slackware. That was the last time i used Slackware. :)
Hahaha yeah that will do that to people
Man you have no idea how much you opening the Tuxedo laptop without tilting it is a selling point for me!
greetings from another guy in Britanny
Having the option to use Windows is definitely a crutch, or at least it can be. There is actual software I have to use Windows for since there literally are no Linux alternatives (yet...), but this is gonna hold you back a lot. I'm happy I am over this hump of using it as a crutch now and I basically don't boot Windows for weeks on end nowadays. Billy G probably thinks I died
0:00 Hey Nick, this is everyone!
Thanks for another great video. It made me think of a lot of forgotten stuff 😄
I actually had issues with modern laptops, without Ethernet, when WiFi drivers didn't come with the install. I had to manually download, move and install those via USB as recent as 2-3 years ago.
I learned the thing with partitioning from freedompenguin (not the name anymore), but that was awesome! Made distrohopping much easier! I learned quite early, so I had fun reinstalling systems, because I liked doing it - I felt pretty cool installing the system from scratch.
And in that regard, I think I kind of fell into the same trap. I did distros hop a lot, but always within Debian based distros, and a lot of ubuntu derivatives. Once I got an extra computer, I tried my hands on fedora and Manjaro (and puppy), but other than that, I have mostly stayed in the Debian branch. I think because I feel comfortable with a lot of the tools, and I have less time for learning now, than I did then. Guess I stayed and stay within my comfort zone on that one. Especially because I don't have a spare computer to test it on and learn it on for now.
Initially I only ran Linux since I had gotten my hands on a wiped PC with no system, so I only ran ubuntu until I figured out to get windows on it. Then I dual booted with mint for a while until I got an old spare that in used to test a lot of stuff on.
The last 4 years or so, I have used Linux exclusively on my private machine and windows on my work laptop.
One thing I am very happy I did, was that in used Foss long before I made the switch, as I did not have money for software, so the jump was easy. And since then, I always look to see if there is a Foss alternative to the piece of software I am presented with when I have a need, as I love the concept.
In terms of the terminal, I am quite limited, but with the stuff i do know how to do in there, I prefer to so in there. It is just easier in a way, because you can use the same interface for a lot of stuff, and that is very easy to navigate. I always wanted to code, so the terminal was quite intriguing to me. Found out the annoying way that I could ruin my system with that - I think I uninstalled python while running regolith. That just removed everything and I had to reinstall 😄
Going into hibernate while the updater was replacing the kernel images was fun.
Also better check paths for spaces, especially when passing them to sudo rm - r...
Linux is full of spontaneous learning opportunities
Biggest mistake: Marking a bunch of stuff in Synaptic for Permanent Removal without knowing what I was doing and hosing my desktop so I was left with just the terminal and no knowledge or means to recover. Oh, and I never remember to put home in a partition. Aside from that, cutting the cord from Windows was the best. I dual-booted and VM'd for a while but with the advent of Windows 10, I couldn't stand to be in thrall of Microsoft any more. I don't own a Windows machine, nor will I ever again... it annoys me that I have to use one for my job, but as long as I don't have to pay for it or link it to any of my personal accounts, I'm happy.
Every sympathy! Although I do remember the Ubuntu server I set up for a project at work where I insisted it would be headless and purely CLI, so my junior and I put up with it for several days before I gave in and said 'ok let's stick a gui on this thing'. Pretty much as simple as sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop - one command to get a whole windowing system! It was bliss!
A nice walk down the memory lane :') I once managed to remove the login screen while setting up ubuntu with KDE back in 2011... was forced to learn about the tty terminal the hard way. But at least in the end (after deleting almost 500 GB data, recovering it back with testdisk and a few sleepless nights of further fixes) the KDE desktop looked amazing.
Many of them really hit close to home. I once had to install Wifi drivers, and getting all the packages and dependencies was just a nightmare. And dual-booting to long and reinstalling Grub every two days was basically the same mistake for me.
Thank you so much for making this video. It's my first time hopping to Linux (I chose Fedora) from Windows and sometimes it can be very frustrating (and even maddening) when you just want to download a program or play a game with friends, and it doesn't work, or it takes a lot of time and effort to make it work.
I don't mind it, I like to research and learn to do stuff, plus I like the idea that you can fully customize your PC and not have to deal so much with performance problems or BLOAT, but sometimes I just want/need to use my PC and there's too much trouble in the way.
Linux certainly makes the user more involved with their PCs, in my experience.
Also, I have a lot of respect for people who not only prompts to like their videos, but also asks you to dislike if you didn't like them. I appreciate your honesty.
Thanks again!
Well, I actually wanted to partition my SSD and have all my files on an extra partition just like on my Windows machine so that I could easily replace the OS behind if Linux failed.
Turned out the installer was too hard for me/I was too stupid for the installer. I wanted to partition the drive, but it wouldn't let me continue (it was missing some parts and was not telling what it missed).
When I tried to copy the setup it would use by default I was able to install it, but not able to boot into the OS.
Most manual installers are atrocously obscure, yeah!
Tried Redhat back in '99 or 2000 and my first mistake was not giving it a proper chance.
Second try and failure was in 2003 when Windows could only see 128GB (or something because BIOS) of my HDD, but the Linux installer could see the rest. I told Linux to install on the leftover space and it wiped the entire drive. Third mistake was not backing up all my projects and files beforehand.
Linux has come a long way though, and for a while even had better default drivers than Windows. On one new computer I set up Ubuntu could use the wifi and proper screen resolution, while Windows used a lower resolution and no wifi until I got drivers.
I only installed Linux (Ubuntu) a few months ago and I've yet to return to Windows even once (even though I have it partitioned). I'm loving the experience and the gnome desktop environment. I wonder however if I should experiment with something else like Manjaro just to give other desktop environments a shot and having flatpack as an option for software. I have had some subtle issues related to having an Nvidia GPU on an occasion but for the most part my system works flawlessly.
for trying the other desktops, definitely recommend starting with a VM if you can. as for flatpak, I'm sure you can install it (and the flathub repository) with apt.
If you go with Manjaro, the arch base combined with stability and user friendliness is the biggest pro, but if you just wanna try another DE and flathub you don't have to switch the distro.
what I did was install different desktop environments onto my system and then select them from the login page. at one point I was using Pop_OS and installed kde and found I liked it more, but there was some weird issues with that. Pop would bleed into kde in some interesting ways, but I couldn't get it to work 100% seamlessly, so I switched over to kde neon to try to get a more seamless experience, and it's worked pretty well. I haven't tried Manjaro long term in years, but I hear it's really good.
Manjaro KDE in a VM is certainly a great choice. Arch, KDE and stability connected in a very user friendly way :))
I just really hate their default theming, however, that's completely subjective ;)
@@thelakeman2538 yeah but installing a DE over another one can cause some issues and also bloat your system, VM is usually the best route
It's because of this channel that I felt comfortable enough to take the plunge! Happily rocking KDE Neon with Wayland on all my devices!
Am guilty of:
-Installing AMD Drivers on Ubuntu when just starting out and thinking i had to install them
-not trying some distros because no particular reason, one of wich was fedora and now that one is my absolute favorite
-tying in to the second one is using arch/arch based distros for a very long time and thinking its the best
-trying to forcefully remove windows on normal harddisk just to make a way too overcomplicated dual gpu setup that virtualises it and passes one of the gpus through
-ownign multiple VR headsets wich are the sole reason im not using Linux as my absolute daily driver
Why is arch not good for a long time?
using windows without internet would suck just as much. You would still struggle with driver installation and many drivers do have dependencies.
My mistake was not staying with Gentoo and instead doing Arch. Linux's strength is that you can pair it with whatever you want any way you want. If you want preconfigured packages go with OpenBSD.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 OpenBSD covers my security needs and laziness prevails. Next home box I install will be Gentoo though. Problem is I rarely switch hardware and I don't install new systems for the fun of it.
For remote servers I think I'll probably stick with void, because OpenBSD doesn't have KVM, and updating packages is simpler and quicker than compiling and testing them. Then again, maybe one day I'll be confident enough to use Gentoo remotely. Or OpenBSD gets KVM support, then I'll stick with that for anything touching the outside world.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 2? I have 6 boxes installed and ready to use. The compiling time isn't what worries me. Actually, I'm not worried at all. I just need the time to get into it again. First time, which was 20 years ago, I had someone install it with me. I'll be going into it fresh so to speak. In the meanwhile I have videos to make, franchises to fix and prizes to win!
Oh, from what I've read, isn't there some tool that shares the compiler load over a network connection? Do you know? Can you recommend?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 I see. Never had the need to duplicate everything, because I'm not a computer wizard like you.
Anyway, thanks for the advice.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Well, then through the powers invested in my newly acquired rank as a hacker (because I run OpenBSD as a desktop) I hereby award you the title old and experienced user of digital machines or computer wizard for short.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Keep fighting the good fight, soldier.
What's been helping me distro hop is having a second monitor on the desk, second PC under the desk, a keyboard switcher (two keyboards is too much on the desk), and two mice (easy to grab the other and quickly do something). Then I can have the second PC running trying some distro, looking up problems on my main PC, and my main PC there to get work done at any time, rather than having to reboot the distro I'm checking back to my main system. PCs are cheap on the local used market and something from ten years ago will still run modern distros fine.
using windows is the greatest mistake
Me, who dual boots
Not a "mistake" per se, I just didn't know better (apart from expensive Mac and this weird Linux thing)
"If there is a game that is not available, I just accept I cannot play it."
Preach!
I’d definitely disagree on the dual booting front. I mostly use Linux for everything I can but there are some things windows can offer which Linux just cannot and that’s why I keep it around. If something breaks on Linux I know I have another os to fix things and my VR headset which I bought before switching to Linux only works on Windows and I can’t be bothered to buy a new one right now!
same. I'd love to not have a windows install but some of my games still do not work on Linux and I'm in the same boat with VR
@@dylon4906 Oculus Rift S gang :(
It's a great little device but I hate Meta so much. I'm still waiting for the day valve announces a index 2
@@realtimestatic i think i have worse, i have a windows mixed reality lmaooo that shits never gonna be supported on linux
@@dylon4906 Do you have an HP Reverb G2 or something. The device looks pretty awesome but I also doubt it'll ever work on Linux. The moment valve announces the Index 2 I know what I'm gonna
do!
@@realtimestatic unfortunately no it's a Samsung odyssey+. I'd like a valve headset as well but they're so expensive lmao
i had been planning to make a separate home partition since about a month ago
it took me 2 years of using Linux to realize this mistake
Using Linux without the internet, I mean sure it's annoying but air gapped systems exist.
Not using a separate /home part, thanks! I'll consider it.
Not distro hopping, so...
I have a laptop that I like to run these so called experiments on. I started with Xubuntu, then ZorinOS, and then Arch. I loved arch so much I switched to it as my main on my PC and never looked back. I am considering Fedora though, because recently had issues. But I'm afraid of losing my setup. /home directory won't help much, most of my programs are on /usr. Separate /usr?
Dual booting, I actually have to disagree on that one. There are simply put things that are *impossible* on Linux. Good luck playing VALORANT or any VR game on an Oculus device. As for work related (Adobe, Office), when you work in the creative industry and people *expect* you to have fully working .ps or .ai files that aren't somewhat broken on Linux, you *need* Windows. Same for Office. There are some features which you *cannot* get on LibreOffice, WPS, ONLY, etc...
You don't even need to dual boot windows, you can boot it up in a KVM virtual machine and Passthrough your GPU to it (it's basically bare metal performance without installing it on bare metal) but the process is kinda difficult and not everyone can do it. As for Valorant, you should avoid playing it anyways (I'm only saying this for Valorant) since it employs a super invasive anti-cheat that runs at 0 ring i.e. Administrator permission (which is why Valorant will never run on linux cause then their Anti-cheat would have to be integrated into the Linux kernel) and god knows what shady things that anti-cheat does, I know for a fact that it runs 24/7 even if you don't actively play Valorant.
Yup. When I have to make the full Linux plunge, my Windows partition is just going to have to get shrunk to about 300GB of NTFS or such, to hold my VR games and certain other things that just aren't reasonably possible right now. One big issue for me though is that while Proton is getting better, it's still overhead and just a little bit of extra overhead can eat like 20% of my performance, depending on the circumstances. It can be the difference of being an enjoyable experience or a frustrating headache to play.
@@yugarthsharma626 Don't you need a secondary GPU that your main system won't primarily use, to be able to passthrough anyway?
But that doesn't really change anything though, if someone only dual-boots for just some games. It's not like it's going to bleed into your Linux boots, especially if you keep everything WSL-related off your Windows boot.
If you're saying that people shouldn't play only Valorant because it runs admin privileges and constantly runs in the background, then that doesn't apply to just Valorant. Punkbuster, if installed, runs on every boot and doesn't pop up in the system tray. So in that sense, Valorant's anti-cheat "wins" because at least it's more honest and upfront about being there, and you can more easily turn it off whilst still keeping it installed, unlike Punkbuster. I messed with both myself, and I personally found it harder to gently turn off Punkbuster (without uninstalling) than Valorant's.
@@L7vanmatre No you can also do single GPU Passthrough, basically it'll disconnect the GPU from you host and give it to the guest but still running under a bare bones Linux kernel (without an output screen of course, unless you have integrated graphics too)
I've never played Punkbuster but I don't recommend Valorant 'cause it will drive game companies into making the same invasive anti-cheat for their own games which is why anyone who cares about privacy shouldn't play Valorant, at least other popular multiplayer games run in the Userspace and not at the kernel level.
Great video, it was important to highlight mistakes you made in the process, so it can be relatable to newcomers who appear to often forget all the times we all have also screwed Windows. really great video.
Thanks!
Depending on your wifi card it was still sometimes necessary to attempt to install some things on arch without internet until quite recently.
Main reason I did not do more experimenting with Arch on my old laptop.
I jumped in at the deep end back in 2000, when I was asked to build a website for the local hockey team. I was doing tech support of Windows machines for a large government department, but a friend at work got me interested in this new(ish) O/S called Linux. Cut my teeth on Slackware, back in the days when it didn't come with a GUI environment. I built up a LAMP server using PHP, Apache, and MySQL, dusted off my SQL skils and taught myself PHP. I can still remember the countless re-compiles of the kernel. I built and administered 5 websites for several years before I retired from the hockey club. I've been using Linux exclusively on my laptop since 2005. I've played with Slackware, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, and settled on Zorin (although I'm checking out Pop! OS)
The only thing I look back with horror in my eyes is not making/having backups.
It is soooo comfortable knowing that I can burn my PC to the ground and next day I can be back to running on a different machine.
Also... I started with SuSE Linux back in 1995, but there was no internet for me back then and I quickly dropped it. Until I got into programming and understood how limiting Windows without WSL really is.
CLI should be mandatory for anyone, who want to have a deeper understanding of Linux. I use it frequently on any OS, but I also like e.g. Cockpit for managing my server, Portainer for managing Docker stuff etc. The advantage is, that I do know how to do most of the stuff by hand using the CLI, but I prefer not to.
I've have done almost every mistake you named and some of them were very annoying (e.g. overwriting EFI Boot or MBR with Windows and having to recover from it, dual booting for too long, disregarding other distros - I still do, because I don't have enough hours in my days).
In the end I am glad I am savvy enough to install, configure and maintain my Linux Server and I wouldn't want it any other way (it's much faster than it was when I had Windows Server installed over there and I usually don't have to ask myself what the hell is chewing on the RAM or CPU).
Great video, keep it up. You're my No.1 Linux channel guy 😊.
Good video. I also avoided the command line like the plague for the longest time. Now I am always looking for a command - why install more software if there is a command already there? Ironically the command line was more needed back 10 years when I first started learning Linux. With gaming now better and better, there is really fewer and fewer reasons to not use Linux, and a lot of good reasons to do so. You own your own computer, you can customize the experience how you want, less bloat and no ads in the software itself.
I followed a random article and modified the grub loader. After the restart the PC was unusable. I had to chroot and set the default grub. Now i do these experiments in VM than in my PC.
Ouch. Yeah some guides are super unreliable
Oh God! I'm making so many of these mistakes and I had little to no idea! Thanks for this video dude.
I love the way you learned linux, installing everything, understanding each part of this system... And with a 56k... Congratulations!!
After hearing the reasoning, I paused the video and made a new /home partition and moved everything accordingly. I never thought of how your settings will follow distro hops.
11:41 I think the man problem with the Linux terminal is that for every command, it seems you have to read 100 pages of description, even if you just want to user it's basic function. If you type a command on the cmd.exe of Windows with the /? parameter, you usually get a very brief description on what it does. If you type in a command on Linux with the -h parameter, you get like 100 pages worth of text that you might have to read all before you find the parameter you need. Why not start with a short summary of 1 or 2 pages and then have the long version after that? If people need to get work done, they can't spend an hour reading a documentation before, so people might instead just use the GUI even in cases in which it is kess efficient.
I accidentally erased my HDD MULTIPLE times and had to restore my most important documents from Dropbox.
These days I'm full-time Windows and only interact with Linux through WSL, but I still love watching Linux content.
In my case, was two things:
1) Try to install every lib I found in synaptics (starting with debian)
2) Try to enable every driver in the kernel (starting with gentoo, after some time with debian)
My worst mistakes: Wiping the wrong disks, reformatting a drive I accidentally formatted to FAT32 and didn’t realise back to ext4 and forgetting to change fstab, forgetting basically every important package whilst installing arch, not using the terminal early enough, sticking to long to a userfriendly distro instead of a usercentric one, using flatpak and snap apps even though they all were in the AUR and using an AUR helper
gaming on linux and proton has come so far that Linux can legitimately be your main os even if you're a gamer these days. especially if you're someone like me who mostly plays single player games anyways. I think there are still just enough games that don't run great on Windows for me to keep it but it's viable for a lot of people now
Wow this video brought back so many horrible memories of my first failed Linux attempt around 2005 era Ubuntu craze. As soon as I would get the correct working drivers for my XFX overclocked Nvidia 8600 GT card OS updates would break it all over again and the search would begin AGAIN!!!!! Driver hell was the biggest hurdle back then so I eventually went back to Windows especially as a hardcore gamer. It's great that it was updated frequently but that also meant things were breaking frequently. It was a very fun experience but Linux just wasn't ready yet. Glad to say partly because of some of the info found on this channel I'm now happily running and loving Mint Cinnamon.
Great content, and thank you.
Great video as always.
Honestly, I haven't been on Linux long enough to make any really harsh mistakes, or maybe I have and just can't see them yet. I did feel your comment about not distro-hopping enough though. That certainly applies to me.
I switched "exclusively" to Linux about 1½ years ago. I have been comfortable on Manjaro ever since. I put the quotation marks there because after having been on Linux for 8 or so months I started studying .NET-development and decided that since the school was all in on Microsoft ecosystem I would do best to get a laptop with Windows on it to go along with my Linux-machine. I am planning to install Fedora on the laptop as a sort of graduation ceremony once I finish school though! :)
Keep up the good work!
Once, I did the good old rm -rf on my home directory... on a server!
Luckily, I had backups and was online again in 5 minutes.
I don't mind the Terminal, has a nostalgic feel for me personally as it conjures up memories of DOS days as a kid - though not the bit where i couldn't spell yet and not load programs effectively...
My first mistake was trying to install programs the Windows way i.e. searching the Internet for installer files. Didn't take me long to figure out what I was doing wrong, though.
I started in '99 with Red Hat and back then you had to configure monitor scanlines, irqs, etc. Nowadays it is all a piece of cake.
Hmmm. My mistakes:
1) A decade ago I broke Ubuntu a few times by installing things that had dependency conflicts and not realizing that forcing it would just break everything. (apt actually warns you nowadays, but IIRC it was pretty cryptic then by just just saying it would need to replace some libraries)
2) An embarrassingly recent mistake was when I experimented with alternative kernels. After finding no measurable difference in my use case, I uninstalled the kernel entirely when I meant to switch back to the normal one. It gave me a EXTREMELY clear warning that my machine would not boot if I proceeded. I though "Gosh! That's not what I want to do", then proceeded anyway because my muscle memory required me to accept every such prompt I've ever been given. (facepalm)
3) Relying too much on the command line. Not a mistake per se. I've been quite comfortable with un*x CLI stuff for a couple decades. It was necessary a long time ago, but now it isn't really. Particularly with the super polished Gnome style apps, I'm finding there to be a nice influx of purpose driven GUI apps I've been ignoring simply out of habit.
4) Not keeping a dedicated Linux machine around. Though Linux was my first Unix experience, once OS X came out I was quite happy with that to fill my desktop Unix needs. Linux mostly was run on low powered hardware or in VMs as needed. As OS X atrophied into a locked down tablet OS and Linux DEs grew up, I missed the point in time where I could have been quite happy running something like Gnome 3 instead.
2:00
Wait, my Rainbow Dust subscription is a scam D:
Oh yeah. These damn pixies have been scamming us for ages!
Back in days I do remember RedHat was supplied on 6CDs as well as Debian, Mandriva or Slackware. Ubuntu was probably the only distro at that time which didn't have full package repos available from the CDs, and only supplied installer CD (for free though). I do remember how RedHat and Mandriva was asking to insert CD #4 for installing some weird app I selected and that was alright for offline usage, apart from the fact that you needed to download the whole 6 goddamn ISO files.
It's been a week since I started using Linux. I have reinstalled it almost everyday after breaking it from the terminal. This video was quite helpful.
My biggest mistake was not actually using Linux!
I discovered that Linux is getting good now around the start of 2019 after I got my new PC, and as I was a long time Windows power user I had enough knowledge and experience to be completely fed up with it so I tried Linux. But I never actually sticked to Linux for any long time, I just had a cycle of getting fed up with Windows, reinstalling Linux, configuring it, tinkering, and trying all the things out for a few days, and eventually just getting tired and switching back to Windows.
But recently - just last month, I got fed up with Windows once again and installed Fedora Linux. Not really sure if anything was much different this time, but I just began to use it and simply loved the experience, it's simply working and the workflow is much smoother than in Windows. Several days after Windows stopped booting after a reboot when I wanted to check it, and I was too lazy to reinstall it, and I actually went on to use Linux without working Windows install.
Now, after almost a month of using Linux continuously - I just can't use Windows, it feels so terrible in comparison. I did look back to think if Windows might still be better for me, after all I am a game developer and Windows is supported more, but even still - Linux felt better (primarily because of development, it sucked on Windows).
Linux is a BELOVED hobby of mine and in the first 2 weeks on Linux, the CONSTANT need to enter my password and not being able to do hardly anything because I didn't understand permissions caused me to do a recursive command to change the permissions in every file in every folder on my system so any user could access without sudo. COMPLETELY destroyed my Linux Mint install (back when they offered KDE Plasma).
*cries in experimental kernel on Manjaro which made me switch to Windows for one week, just so that I could reinstall Manjaro again*
Back in 1995 I installed Coherent (Linux wannabe). It took a week and hours and hours of researching monitors and video cards. When I had it running, I left for lunch and when I came back a core-dump was showing on my screen. YIKES! I had selected a screensaver called "BSOD" (Blue Screen Of Death) and it had kicked in. Nearly had a heart attack. After that was Red Hat before they went commercial. So much easier. Thanks for your 'casts. Keep 'em coming.
MAN! That Gnome 2 UI takes me back! I started with Feisty Fawn, I think it was? 2006? 2007? The good old days! Back when we had those cool Compiz effects. I had the cube, and gratuitous amounts of fire. Haha. Things were simple and fun back then.
Probably not my biggest mistake, but one I certainly felt, was not rebuilding my grub bootloader when I removed my windows dual boot from my laptop.
To make matters worse, the laptop has a firmware os recovery system, which took a look at what I'd done, wiped the partition table, and told me to reinstall windows.
It took over 5 hours for me to repair the damage, though half of that was just trying to get a working bootable USB drive, since the one I had been using stopped being recognised by the uefi.
Yes, it's really annoying that vendors try to force Windows on you. i think you can still disable this "feature" in the BIOS setup, but many people don't even know about this.
Very much agree on the dual booting. I didn't start learning Linux until I managed to fubar my bootloader and couldn't boot into Windows.
Real missed opportunity for the as seen on TV dramatic reenactment with the driver installs haha
That brought some suppressed memories back. I successfully forgot what a nightmare Linux without the internet was. Oh boy, how I longed for a router in those days!
I usually opt not to have a separate home partition just so I don't have my storage space fragmented into multiple pieces. I don't want to accidentally have my / partition full while my home one has plenty of space, or visa versa.
I use multiple computers with multiple OSes and reinstall everything frequently, so I usually store data on a separate drive (not home partition). I also sync everything via nextcloud (on my own server). Potentially, this is not very safe: if my nextcloud is hacked, they can steal all my data (however, I don’t think that anyone really needs my data) but it is very convenient.
Also, very important note - synchronization is not a backup!
Flatpacks are awesome and I discovered them thanks to you! Dualbooting might be required sometimes though, I for one use industrial software very resource hungry, but then I do everything else on ubuntu
Regarding the home partition. Nowadays it's probably not necessary if you are using a dotfile manager and backing up your personal home files properly. Not that you can't still do it but then you have to know what size you want to have your partitions.
The worst mistake, that I was doing over and over again was just copying commands form the internet without thinking or examining them, what they are doing and then things broke very often. I think this is the major mistake, what linux begginers doing and it's really important to understand, what every command does!