Bluewing comments on Microsoft Raises Prices for All Surface PCs, Making Them More Expensive Than Equivalent Macs

[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (8 children)

I would recommend looking at Fedora for your next step in distro surfing. Fedora stays close to the bleeding edge without going full yeet over the edge. Fedora offers Gnome and KDE as the "standard" choices for your desktop and a good number of spins to look at also. Plus there are the Atomic versions as well.

One of the spins is the COSMIC DE, and I'm running it on a mini desktop. It's OK, but I agree with you, it's not quite finished yet. When Fedora 44 gets released, I think I will go back to LXQT on that box. I just rebased my Kinonite laptop to Aurora 44 Beta for fun.

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[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 6 months ago (7 children)

Ooo I actually did Fedora with KDE as my most recent install! It’s now running as our living room media computer and my partner has no complaints! I DID have some issues, though—it was actually more difficult than I expected! At first, it refused to play any media from my SMB server from the integrated video player or even VLC. After a lot of digging, I learned that the Fedora version of VLC is not shipped with SMB support, so I had to go find and install Samba plugin. Then it played! Mostly. Except for when it didn’t play video, or a file at all. THEN I learned that Fedora doesn’t ship with the video codecs I’ve had in all my other OSes! So I find a helpful post from a while ago on some forum that leads me to install THOSE… and it works! VLC now plays everything, and from my server!

…oop, except the speakers make a loud horrible popping sound randomly when not playing media! This took me two days to fix. Initially I plugged in a 3.5mm to USB adapter and that worked fine with no pops, but the whole point of me playing with new OSes is to learn to how to fix things, first by searching the internet, then asking if I can’t do it myself (I have a couple friends who can fix legit ANYTHING Linux.) For the Fedora install, I was stubborn and REALLY didn’t wanna ask anyone for help. Eventually I found out the popping was caused by the system going into some sort of power save mode for audio. I found a terminal command that fixed it but it was back every reboot. I found a few different suggestions of edits I could to to config files and none worked. FINALLY one post had a suggestion for someone having the same issue that actually fixed it for me! I get a pop on startup, but most OSes do, and no pops at all when using the OS.

Overall, I like Fedora, but it did have more issues than I ran into when installing Pop!.

Last night, I got all messed up with my partner and played games with friends. Super early in the morning, I decided to wind down by trying to install CatchyOS alongside the Windows install that was already on another mini desktop I just switched out to the Fedora one. Since it’s a type of Arch Linux, I expected hilarious results, and me not being able to figure out how to install it at all, having heard of Arch’s high learning curve. In like 30 minutes, I had it installed, working perfectly with everything, VLC plays every file from my server, custom global themes work (still having trouble on my Fedora install with those…) and wow. I love it so far, but I’ve only used it for like a half hour last night and a bit this morning hahaha

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[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Yeah, Fedora is into the open source only install thing. So Codecs don't get installed by default and need to added later. Don't feel bad about it. That catches a lot of first time users. They do make it pretty easy to get them installed once you know you need to do that.

The speaker thing was unfortunate. I'm notorious for buying the cheapest hardware I can find. And I think I only had that popping issue once years ago when distros were far more rough around the edges then they are today. My problem with Fedora is that it loses my printer randomly. But I don't print a lot, so I haven't bothered with looking for a fix.

You've still got a lot of surfing to do yet, and you've tried Fedora. CatchyOS is supposed to be pretty beginner-friendly for an Arch fork. But I'm not sure CatchyOS has a really high user retention rate. I should look into it one day, but I'm old, and my surfing days are over. I like atomic spins because once setup they require no effort on my part anymore. They are boring and I like it that way.

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[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 6 months ago* (5 children)

The speaker popping thing was so weird! It happened with anything plugged into the built-in 3.5mm jack, and it happened A LOT. It’s normal to hear that while first booting or shutting down, but Fedora did it like a LOT. The machine is a Lenovo Tiny, so it’s nice hardware. I have replicated the pops in Catchy now on another (identical) Lenovo Tiny, but only when it dims the screen for power-save mode. Solution: no more power save mode hahaha.

I didn’t even consider printer! I have a laserjet on my network, I’ll have to set that up on each of my distros and see how they handle it!

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[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I have noticed that Lenovo laptops can have some weird issues with Fedora. From your speaker issues to not being able to get the distro installed for no good reason. The problems are not all that common, but they do happen.

I think Laser printers work very well with Fedora. My HP 7100 color inkjet is a royal pain sometimes. But Grandma demands to be able to print color photos of our Grandsons at any time. She ain't waiting until we have a good reason to make the 100-mile round trip to the nearest store that can print out digital photos for her. And I ain't spending the money for a photo quality laser printer.

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[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

My lil Lenovos are actually desktops! But I’m sure they use laptop parts, considering their insanely small size. Getting Linux on any of them was a breeze, I knew to install windows first and disable all the stupid fast boot/secure boot garbage, and I did get some errors starting out that some things in my BIOS were not enabled (VMX and SGX) but I was able to easily find and enable those! :3

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[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Turning off fast boot is still a good idea, but Linux distros do work with secure boot these days. So there is no need to turn it off anymore. Not saying it can't cause some issues at times, though rarely anymore. But Microsoft does provide the keys for secure boot. Where you can find an issue is with proprietary drivers like Nvidia. But Fedora has good and clear instructions on creating and installing MOK, (machine owner keys) to solve the secure boot issue them. I know the Arch wiki has them also.

In any case enjoy CachyOS and whatever comes after!

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[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

I didn’t know that—thank you for the info! I’m only really trying various distros to learn more, so I appreciate any and all advice anyone gives me!

I don’t know anything about MOKs, so I’ll do some reading this morning! So far Fedora is prolly gonna stay on the living room media computer, as it works a dream, is super fast, and now that I’ve solved the few issues it had, it’s excellent! My partner who has only used a bit of Linux has no complaints about it haha.

I’ll eventually have to settle on a distro for our main game machines. They’ll still be dual booting W10LTSCIoT for games that don’t work in Linux, but if I can switch every computer in the house to main Linux, I’ll be a happy Rai! Right now, there’s just a couple big things that either only work on Windows, or are so much easier to manage on Windows (hosting a Valheim server with multiple different worlds and modlists that can be easily switched between is a big one right now for me) I gotta boot windows for those.

I have been lucky not to have had issues with NVidia, but on our third game machine, I went with Pop as it was recommended for easy install with NVidia for games hahaha. I made that machine specially for Beat Saber (no Facebook code on any machines with PII in my house!) so if can get Beat Saber with like a thousand songs modded in playing on my ASUS WMR kit on Linux, I’d be over the moon. Alas, it looks like Oasis only works for Winders right now, but it sounds like some smarter folks than I have been working on a WMR driver for Linux.

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[–] Bluewing@lemmy.world 1 point 6 months ago

Older NVIDIA cards tend to be pretty stable, but the latest and greatest stuff not so much.

Since you have a fair number of boxes to manage. If it was me, I would take a look at Atomic distros. And Fedora is a big driver of them. Since you like KDE, you could test the Kinonite spin. And if you do want the hassle of installing nVidia drivers, then maybe Aurora, (a direct fork of Kinonite), might be a better choice. You can choose your graphics card when you download the iso, install and then have everything working on first boot. Aurora also has all the codecs included. Atomic spins make managing multiple computers for users so much easier. Your partner can install/uninstall user software with little worry about breaking the system. And you sleep better at night.

Not saying you need to do it, go have some fun with CachyOS and other distros. But maybe start learning about it and thinking if it might have a place for you.

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