Debian is also my answer.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.

If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.

All the popular distros are more reliable than Windows 🤷

Mint works perfectly for me, for that same use case

Besides Debian?

yep

In the GUI, it doesn't find anything. The icon keeps rotating and nothing more. If I set a connection with a known SSID and password in the 01-netconf.yml file it connects. Problem is that it would not work with a web-based authentication, for example. Also, what I set up in the yml file does not appear under Saved Networks in the GUI.

Heheh, I've spent over a week tweaking configs and getting everything the way I want it, which isn't totally necessary, but I'm picky and I want to start from a solid base and not have to change anything later when it's all cluttered and more convoluted. Plus I'm enjoying the process of learning the ins and out of the operating system, and the best way to do that is to play around.

I've also been installing various packages and getting those set up, auditing my system's security, bootlogs, running services, etc... I still have my work cut out for me but I've peppered the dull stuff with fun stuff.

I've also been learning bash commands from scratch so that's been... fun... and today I even wrote my first scripts and created anacron jobs to run clamscan, maldet, rkhunter, and aide!

But yeah I'm not quite to the "actually start using my system as a tool" part yet, but that's gonna be so exciting! I've installed some cool software like jupyterlab and logseq and other stuff that I can't wait to play around with!

How does timeshift compare with rsync and kup? So far my backups look like this: I get a list of all my installed apps with pacman -Q (maybe I need to try yay -Q too now that I think of it) and make a tar archive of my KDE config dotfiles, then I use rsync to get a snapshot of most of my system. I haven't used grysnc yet for the GUI but I installed it so I'll try it next time. I also installed borg/vorta to make a deduplicated image of my home directory. Does timeshift have any advantages over that system?

A month? I'm almost disappointed that I like Endeavour so much, because there are so many other distros I want to try. But I'm getting my bases settled, and then I'll try others in VMs and make live ISO USBs of the ones I like.

Is there a pacman version of apt list --upgradable? Or does it not need one because it already lists everything and then asks you to confirm before proceeding?

And what's the advantage of flatpaks? I just removed all the ones that came on my system, and I uninstalled flatpak, deleted all the remnants in my directories, and userdeled the flatpak system user. What is dependency hell? The package manager seems to resolve them quite eloquently.

I don't think I'll ever relive the euphoria of my first day on linux, and least up until the part where my KDE session crashed and I panicked and almost broke things even further before figuring out what I needed to do and then fixing it. That was my trial by fire that forced me to learn how to use the terminal.

But yeah, all my life I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Mac, I hated Mac even worse than Windows). Actually, computers are awesome. I fucking love computers. I just had to get on Linux to realize that...

I did finally get Cinnamon to restart one time. There were some minor issues, but it started back up and was usable for a few minutes. After that, it hung up so hard that only a reboot fixed it. One issue on restart was that the start menu was kind of wonky, like a web page that had lost its css file.

For anyone following this, I found the following link to be helpful.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/143838/how-do-i-restart-cinnamon-from-the-tty

OK, I just did some testing, and it was not exactly what I was expecting. For one, it's kind of hard to intentionally use a lot of memory. The best thing I found was opening a large amount of tabs in Firefox. I maybe could increase my swap space, but I never hung my system up. I shut down the vm and used about 18 gig of ram. I then started the vm.

The deal is, Stacer isn't exactly accurate when the VM starts. For some reason, memory usage (on Stacer) drops when the vm starts up. Checking the system resource monitor, memory usage briefly jumped to 28 gig in it. It never reflected this on Stacer. However, without the full 16 gig of ram allocated to the vm, Windows boots up, and then shuts back down after a brief period.

I stopped and started Windows numerous times. It would actually make Linux stutter as the memory maxed out, but it never froze up to the point I had to reboot to fix it.

The swap space did about max out during some of this. I do think I will increase the swap space a little.

It's pretty much a default install of Linux Mint, with Cinnamon. I haven't even installed that many programs, yet. Pretty much a vm, vscode, 4 browsers, gimp, and some small utilities.

That sounds really cool! That's exactly what I was hoping/expecting trillium to be, but I couldn't find that one on the AUR so logseq it is then!

It might actually be running out of memory. 16GB are used, and the other 16GB are unusable somehow. Could be a bad RAM stick or bad connection (as mentioned by others), or it could be a memory quota. Run ulimit -a to check the quota.

However, on my second read, the symptoms do not match up with running out of memory. (can drop to the console, can move the mouse) It could be a problem with the desktop environment. Which DE do you use?

That question has a lot of ways to go in. A swap file on Linux or Windows running in my vm? Also, I have a new PC with 32 gig of RAM. I allocated half to the vm when it is running. This kind of brings me to why I asked this question to begin with. I have Stacer installed and I've never seen my memory usage go over halfway (Stacer graph) when I have the vm running. I pretty much always have my vm running, because I need it running. I shouldn't be running out of memory. If it shows my 16ish gigs of ram used when the vm is fired up, then I should have 16ish gigs of ram that I've never seen being used.

I really wouldn't think the vm is running out of memory. There is 16 gig allocated and all it has running is IIS server, VisualStudio, and Firefox. I rarely open much more than that on it. I never browse on Windows' Firefox. It's just open because VisualStudio opens a browser while I'm debugging. At most, the only other programs running on the vm are File Manager and Notepad.

If I close the vm, Stacer shows my memory usage at 11 Gig. That means the vm should be using close to 6ish gig when it is fired up (according to Stacer).

Note: Yeah, I'm not able to check Stacer after it hangs up. I do spot checks with it from time to time. Like I said, about 50% of the ram is being used when my vm is fired up. No matter what I'm doing, I've never seen more than that used.

Thanks,

Disabling those should be similar. Search for NVIDIA in the driver name, and use the same process.

I respect that, but putting control characters in scripts feels wrong to me.

It's good that you enjoy the CLI. It definitely will teach you a lot!

I've never used Trullium, but I know that Trillium is for chatting. In any case LogSeq is a non-hierarchical note taking app. Popular proprietary alternatives are notion and obsidian. It's like a personal wiki. When you create a tag with #someTag it creates the "someTag" note as well and shows the reverse links kall pages with that tag). The same can be achieved with [[Another Page]] then "Another Page" is created.

It's very useful for journaling or quick note taking that links everything together.

thanks but it looks like I'm using the proprietary drivers.

Do you have any SWAP partition or swapfile? That will allow the host operating system to use parts of the disk as memory. Instead of completely locking up when it runs out of memory, it will get slow first, and buy you more time.

I use echo ^G

(That ^G is a literal control-G character, type control-V then control-G to get it, or Insert then control-G)

It might still be a driver problem, with the NVIDIA drivers in general. Try booting with software rendering only, to see if that's the case.

Here’s how to disable the GPU drivers:

Remove “nomodeset” from the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable in /etc/default/grub

Add “rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau” to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX instead

Run sudo update-grub then reboot

Note: This only works if you’re using the open-source drivers, known as Nouveau. If you’re using the proprietary drivers, this will not work.

To check if you’re using Nouveau or the proprietary drivers, run lspci and check for “NVIDIA”, then run lsmod and check for Nouveau.

Remember to change it back when you want to re-enable the NVIDIA drivers.

(PS: I used this website as a source, their procedure is more complicated, and focused on Fedora.)

good luck