> Linux won't stop you if you try to use a command that deletes every file on your PC ("sudo rm -rf /").
It will definitely stop you from running that command because of "--preserve-root" that is enabled by default, if you want to break your system you have to opt out of it. Just don't try to put an asterisk after, pathname expansion will be a different case ("rm -rf /*").
alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
"rm -if" never prompts, "rm -fi" prompts. --preserve-root is an entirely different thing which will stop the command from deleting files even if you told it to.
$ sudo rm -ri /
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
(I would write something like "Refusing to delete the entire filesystem (did a shell variable expansion go wrong?)".)
"Out of memory: Kill process or sacrifice child"
Until you come across a system old enough that the coreutils' rm doesn't have that safeguard. And that is how I accidentally'd my OLPC XO's Fedora install.
TBF, this safeguard has never saved me, being careful saved me. You can afford to take the time to be careful, because writing the powershell equivalent is probably at least ten times longer (just kidding, or am I?), and clicking buttons in the file explorer is a hundred times longer. Always write the "-rf" after writing the path! I never run rsync without a dry-run, too, even without --delete.
I've been running Linux for gaming for well over 15 years and have not missed much in the last 5 or so. There's way too many games out there to play that do run on Linux even if unemployed and have the time to dedicate it as your sole hobby.
To check for game compatibility, you should check :
- Steam store page for Steam Deck compatibility, be aware that sometimes a bad rating only means the in-game text is too small to read on small screens or that gamepad support is poor, also I've played multiple "not supported" games that ran just fine.
- ProtonDB, community rating, separate comments for Steam Deck and PC, troubleshooting for Nvidia/AMD specific issues, etc. -> This includes Valve's Steam Deck compatibility score https://www.protondb.com/app/1808500?device=pc
- https://areweanticheatyet.com/game/arc-raiders AWACY says ARC Raiders is not officially supported, but runs. You never know, it might break in the future or not.
- Be aware that the Steam Client is only officially supported on Ubuntu, though you might be fine with other distros as well. Don't use the open source "nouveau" GPU driver, use the proprietary Nvidia drivers, also I've had GPU hiccups during the transition from X.org to Wayland that might be related to NVIDIA, but now it's fine.
You could just buy another SSD and install Linux on that. Then, you have your Windows drive left untouched and pristine so you can swap back if you want, or you can pull data over as needed.
I wouldn't try to dual boot, mainly from past experience. Linux is very fine with it, but Windows can aggressively try to repair itself and break other things, or end up broken itself.
Prepare for some potential headaches, do some research and see what kind of problems you might encounter. And before blaming Linux watch this short clip[0].
>> Linux won't stop you if you try to use a command that deletes every file on your PC ("sudo rm -rf /").
> It will definitely stop you from running that command
I think for the average person this would be synonymous to "every file on your PC". It is all the files that they care about. It deletes everything they have permission for. Everything
they* own. For the average user `rm -rf /` is no different than `sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /`That said,
some* systems have some protections. It is common to see the following aliases in the default .bashrc (check your /etc/skel/.bashrc) but also we have to ask the question "is this a bad thing?" I'm not so sure the answer is as clear as people like to suggest it is. But you're asking your computer to do something and either it is going to do that thing or it is going to refuse. I'm personally on the side that a computer refusing to do what you ask it to do is a worse thing, but I can also understand why people want to add in precautions to protect users. Sudo is even one of those!I'd also suggest adding the following to your ~/.bashrc and would encourage distro makes to put this in /etc/skel/.bashrc
alias rm='rm -I' # Ask for confirmation if deleting more than 3 files
#alias rm='rm -i' # Ask for confirmation if deleting files
alias cp='cp -i' # Ask for confirmation if overwriting files
alias mv='mv -i' # Ask for confirmation if overwriting files
I'm a developer, so I'm techy enough how to look up what I don't know, but I would never recommend this to someone who struggles with technology.
Kernel antic heat is frustrating but usually its games where I feel like I won't lose anything if I don't play it.
And for those you still have options, through streaming:
1> A small headless Windows PC powered with a videocard like a Radeon 9070 XT and a nifty app called Moonlight (https://moonlight-stream.org/) enables you to stream games protected with kernel level anti cheat to Linux machines (and some other devices).
2> Geforce Now supports some games notoriously renowned for their kernel level anti cheat like Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty Black Ops 7. With some trickery it is possible to run the app they "exclusively" developed for handhelds like the Deck on any Linux distro, because it is just a desktop app distributed through Flatpak.
That aside, the Windows API is one of the most godawful, miserable pieces of code I've ever had to work with. I've been up to my neck in WinRT writing Bluetooth drivers and holy fuck I wouldn't wish this misery on anyone. I don't know how any developer or engineer ever gets anything done on Windows.
Last job let me use Linux where it mattered most, and new job doesn't care so long as the work is done. I don't think I'll accept a job anywhere that requires Windows in the future. There is just plain and simple no feasible way to do my work on Windows anymore.
This is a bit suspect. WinRT is an entirely user-mode library meant for writing user-mode applications; why would you be writing Bluetooth drivers in that? It's like writing Linux drivers with GTK. Why aren't you writing the driver with UMDF2[1]? I have so many questions.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-hardware/drivers/w...
Whatever's possible, local on Linux. If it's not, one of my servers has a GPU that I pass through to a Windows VM, and run the games there and displayed by streaming. Also works for VR.
Not a setup for everyone and a tad technically complex to set up, but it works well enough for my needs.
It does run into some trouble with games that don't like virtual machines, but since I'm a very casual gamer I just play things that don't complain about that.
> Can someone be the Steam for Excel, please? :)
You can actually add anything you want to Steam, so you can use Steam Link to run Excel remotely.
"I’ve spent dozens of hours combing through Reddit threads, analyzing old Stack Overflow solutions, and, in times of true desperation, asking AI chatbots like Mistral’s Le Chat and Anthropic’s Claude for help deciphering error messages. Luckily, the Linux community is also very supportive. If you’re willing to ask for help, or at least do a little troubleshooting, you’ll be able to work out any problems that come your way."
There are many people -- like my Mom or Dad, for example -- who will never find this appealing and are likely to dig themselves into deeper holes trying to fix system issues on the command line. That's why Steve Jobs was on the money when he talked about a computer that was as intuitive as an appliance -- it has to "just work" for most normies. While I'm as frustrated with Windows as the next person, I'd probably just hand the average person a Mac mini instead of popping a linux distro on their machine if they needed a new computer (though if all they are doing is just browsing the web and reading emails, a ubuntu install is probably fine).
I’m in favor of Linux becoming more dominant as a desktop operating system but there is still plenty of work to be done in making it suitable for mass adoption. Denying that only slows the timeline on Linux’s ascendance.
I mean, yes, I've had to look things up to see how to do things in Linux. I've also had to do that on MacOS. (Just the other day, I couldn't remember what the Task Manager-equivalent on MacOS was, and nothing I typed into the launcher was coming up with an appropriate app, so I had to ask the robot what it was named.)
But dozens of hours? Maybe back in the Red Hat 4.2 days, but not now. Some of that is obviously just that I have a lot of knowledge about things, but even so.
I could see that among other things totaling dozens of hours for a Linux beginner. Power management on laptops is still a common sticking point; i probably spent more than a dozen hours on that alone before giving up and going back to Windows on my laptop. And I've been using Linux for 20 years.
I definitely had to, and continue to, search online for help. Sure, perhaps MacOS is more intuitive than Linux, but not by much.
I've found support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com to be incredibly wanting. This isn't helped in the slightest by the fact that OSX changes tools, even in major versions. If anyone is doubting the "harder to get" claim then I encourage you to search (you can use LLMs) to figure out how to print the SSID you're connected to from the CLI. Such a task is really really simple. I can tell you a bunch of ways to do this on linux with tools like `iw`, `iwconfig`, `nmcli`, or `iwgetid` but I can no longer tell you how to do this on OSX. The linux answer is hard because the tool might change based on your distro or you can install a tool. That requires more understanding. But on OSX, this category of problems don't exist.
If you want the old answer you can see here. None of those work, even with sudo, nor does wtallis's answer, despite this working on an earlier version of Sequoia (FWIW, I'm now on 15.7.3): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41633547
Yeah, the official Apple support forums are and have always been embarrassingly bad.
I don't use the CLI on my Macs all that often, so there might be a better way to do it, but this works on Tahoe:
networksetup -listpreferredwirelessnetworks en0 | grep -v '^Preferred networks on' | head -1 | xargs
> networksetup -listpreferredwirelessnetworks en0
Is Tahoe doing something different? If so, honestly that only exemplifies my point of how Apple is creating a difficult ecosystem to navigate through, where the correct incantations change, even through minor versions.
*IT IS MADDENING*
> There's also get-ssid: https://github.com/fjh658/get-ssid
But get-ssid still has a problem... it requires root. For my original use case I was wanting to run ssh proxy jumps and rsyncs based on the SSID I'm connected to. This doesn't really work for those cases. Escalating to root just creates a major security concern and I definitely don't want automated processes doing escalating unless absolutely necessary.
Back when I used Windows a lot (Windwos XP times...) I also had the "long, scarring evening of frustation" rather often. It was usually solved by a reinstall.
In recent times, the “standard” seems to be smartphones (I use Android). The logic of smartphones it: It works or it dosen't and if it doesn't there is nothing you can do about it. Like ... not supporting some docking station because its network interface is called usb0 rather than eth0 ... no bypass, no solution, buy another docking station.
Of course this is faster than debugging the issue and maybe fixing it for good or maybe waste the evening on it.
Effectively Linux giving you the option to do something about errors doesn't mean the workarounds from other OSes like “reinstall”, “buy a new one”, “use a friend's system because it doesn't work here” are still readily available?
Now, my Ubuntu server has also been running continuously since 2019. Linux can be that solid for the right use case. I've got a Linux HTPC that's pretty worry free, too.
Linux just legitimately has some hard-if-not-impossible problems on random specific consumer hardware, sadly. Until manufacturers start actually supporting it, that'll always be the case. Manufacturers have gotten better about it too, though, and I'm hoping valve continues making official Linux support more appealing for device manufacturers.
I guess all I'm saying is, some things on Linux still actually just can't be fixed, and every platform is gonna give you a night of extreme frustration from time to time.
> but my Windows gaming desktop has been running more or less without issue (barring hardware failure), no reinstalls, since 2019
> I tried so hard to use Linux on my laptop
I'm not trying to say Linux doesn't have issues, but I do need to point out that your logic has a strong bias to it. I'll also add that while I have no problems gaming on my Linux desktop (thanks Valve!!), I don't usually play online games or MMOs but my understanding is that this is problematic for Linux systems as anticheat is a pain.
[0] My friend has a Framework laptop which has PopOS on it and he's said he's had no issues with it. He's used other Linux laptops before and has expressed this has been a very different experience. I think it helps that they're more aware of the hardware and can do more robust testing on that hardware.
> ubuntu install is probably fine
Ubuntu and Gnome should be avoided even as suggestions. Ubuntu has become less reliable than Fedora in my experience. And Gnome does Gnome things that are incompatible of the average users requirement from a desktop encironment.
That was such a culture shock. Endless pop-ups to do this and subscribe to that and so on. And it has gotten worse since then of course.
Instead I set her up on a nice mature Linux desktop - Mate - and that was fine. Chrome, Thunderbird and not much else. And solid reliable and nobody reaching in from the cloud with the latest attempts to monetize something or push AI onto you or whatever. You turn on (unsuspend) the computer and it's the same computer it was yesterday, working just the same.
For OSX, I mostly agree but think "just works" is a bit too strong of a statement too. There are definitely fewer errors but they aren't non-existent. These seem to have dramatically increased with OSX 26 as well as the fact that the UX has significantly changed and in ways that contradict how things worked before. I get frequent calls from my parents. We'll set aside how often I'm searching how to do things and my absolute hatred for how little support there actually is online (good fucking god how utterly useless are support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com?!?!)[0]
I've also handed them linux computers. Truth is that they can't tell the difference. But it also depends on what type of user your parents are. Mine just browse the internet so they already know to use Firefox and they're good to go. Probably the most confusing thing for them would be to navigate the app store (I have no expectation for them to use the CLI) and understand what apps they need because the names are different from what they're used to. I think people under-appreciate how big of an impact this type of lock-in actually is. Search is still a pretty difficult problem and frankly older people don't even understand very basic search. (My mom still types in www.google.com every time she wants to search. Yes, I've showed her she can just type her query into the url bar...). That said, they also switched to DDG on their own accord (I did not tell them).
[0] On linux 95 times out of 100 I can find what I'm looking for with a search. But that's biased by years of experience and knowing what to search. Though I can use the same patterns as I would with linux, swapping out the tool for the OSX version and I will not get good results. If you want to see an example try searching for how to print out your network SSID from the CLI. You can even ask an LLM! In fact, I no longer know how to do this, even with sudo. I specifically mean "no longer" because I used to be able to... And let's be honest, what fucking reason is there to prevent one from seeing the SSID in the CLI? It's not private information. I can see it from the GUI no problem!
> Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems
That being said, given the huge uptick in Linux articles lately, I can only believe Canonical is funding something here. It's just too sudden of a surge.
I'll probably still game on Linux, but who knows if that will last after a few more "freeze on resume" situations. These just don't happen on Windows and most Linux sentiment seems to be coming from anti-Onedrive feelings, which is fair, but the popups are easy to click through. Random Linux instability, not so.
There’s something to be said for “Windows creep” though, where the install decays over time and a reinstall is required. Back in the 2K/XP/Vista days this could be pretty bad, but that improved with 7 onwards. It still exists today, but the decay takes years to become noticeable instead of months.
Linux isn’t without its own issues there however. Even on a more friendly distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, eventually one will end up with things like config files that slipped through the cracks and didn’t get migrated correctly, very slowing degrading the desktop experience.
I went with Fedora Kinoite, and everything worked perfectly fine. I did choose an AMD GPU for this experiment, going with a 7800 XT.
Later that summer I decided to rebase (not reinstall, rebasing in fedora atomic is neat) to Bazzite, a more gaming focused version with some convience features, but that's about it.
Everything I want to do on my computer works fine, I don't feel hamstrung by it and really enjoy using it. The only game I regularly play that doesn't work is Battlefield 6, which I had a small Windows drive for, but I stopped playing that after the hype died down. The Finals, Arc Raiders, CS2, Hunt Showdown, Guild Wars 2, all run great.
While I see that recommending a different distro seems like more change and more fiddling about, Bazzite is something to try out for sure. As long as you don't have a very complicated usecase, it really does get out of your way and remove a lot of the foot-guns you find on linux.
I really think it's ideal for a gamer usecase, and it's also great for a parent/casual user who does most of their work inside a browser anyway. As a programmer with a big distro-hopping past, I've switched to Bluefin/Bazzite on all my personal computers and things work well. I'm glad to have something that works well out of the box and glad to not think about the OS.
jqpabc123•3w ago
In other words, you've found a new hobby along with your new operating system.
And that's OK --- but not everyone is looking for a hobby.
maxwellsdeamons•3w ago
jqpabc123•3w ago
baal80spam•3w ago
DennisP•3w ago
queenkjuul•3w ago
DennisP•1w ago
taeric•3w ago
To that end, the last time I tinkered with what linux distro I'm using is over a decade ago.
juujian•3w ago
mindcrash•3w ago
The only thing you'll have to decide is if you want a desktop which looks more similar to MacOS (GNOME) or Windows (KDE). For now they don't even care about even more advantages or disadvantages, like the fact that KDE is customizable to the point things can get a little crazy.
Graphical desktop and Steam support (with a little pinch of Lutris added on top), and that's good enough.
lukaslalinsky•3w ago
t0bia_s•3w ago