Another comment: fedora is a good distro. Mint is also good. Both are pretty straightforward, will do what you want, and are easy to work with. They are recommended a lot for good reason.
There are three main types of software.
When looking for software, I think most people install them in that order. (Some distros are immutable and therefore 2) is often the first choice but that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit)
Hope this helps.
The answer to starting fresh is to format the entire drive and reparation the whole thing. All operating system installers ship with tools to do that. Some are easier to use than others, but they are all there. You’re looking for “custom install or custom partitioning or manual partitioning” or something like that. Usually during the “where do you want to install” questions.
It’s not hard to do, but it’s often hidden a little bit because formatting and/or repartitioning the wrong drive nukes the drive.
In your case, just go to town. Know how big your drive is, delete all existing partitions, and the new ones you create should total up to the size of the drive. Just make sure you’re doing it to the right drive if you have more than one :)
With Linux, you can get fancy making separate partitions for home and stuff, but you don’t really need to worry about that if you don’t want to. You can just nuke the drive, and then tell the os to “use the whole drive” and just let it do its thing.
If you want to understand it deeper and better, I’d suggest watching some videos for your distro.
Have fun!
I too just finished dungeon crawler Carl book 1. I almost gave up on it quick - it started off juvenile and a bad “video game to book” translation. But it grew on me - I’m more than halfway through book 2 now and it keeps getting better. I think it might be worthy of the hype! ;)
100% agree. The windows fanbois always come out in force and defend Microsoft, they act like the abused in bad marriages defending their dirtbag husband who beats them /shrug
It’s not a problem with my computer. I didn’t do anything “wrong”. I clean installed win 11 on its own hard drive because 1) I own a retail copy and 2) my daughter is taking the lsat test and it requires windows or macOS. The install took hours. And the part that slowed it down was the update process. Ok no big deal, it’s a new install, i mean fedora fresh installs in like 15 minutes (and most of that is me clicking buttons), but whatever. So that’s it, it’s just a clean install of win11. Every month or so, I boot it up and hit the update button. It’s painful, every time. Yes I get it’s designed to slow roll in the background but come on - if I open up settings -> windows update and hit the update now button - then get to work already. It’s always a 20+ minute process. This last one was exceptionally long, but you get my point.
And these updates are always terrible, stuff breaks right away. After the last update the lock screen was all Asian characters. The rest of the OS was fine, just the lock screen changed. Dafuq? The recycle bin contents were all like hash file names. A year or two ago an update on my wife’s laptop wouldn’t proceed because the recovery partition that win11 itself created during install was too small. All other further updates wouldn’t go either because that one was stuck. Like grandma is going to resize partitions - granny’s computer is heading towards bot ville.
Anyways ya, windows sucks big hairy donkey balls now. 50% of that suckage comes from windows update. The other 50% comes from them shoving poo in your face every chance it gets.
Definitely true when learning Linux, but to be fair, things do break on their own. Example: just yesterday I updated fedora and it broke my network connections for my vms. I certainly didn’t do that, and it seems to be a repeating issue.
But you wanna know what the difference is?
Compare that to me updating win11 on a faster more capable computer a couple weeks ago:
Linux is great, not perfect, but great with great communities.
No, not yeast. The beer replaced water. I used cans from a 6 pack :)
My family emptied the freezer - all the prior loaves have been eaten. These are whole wheat 40% loaves made with beer. Smithwicks red ale to be exact. First time using beer - they smelled like beer until cooked, now they smell regular. We’ll see how they taste when I cut them after they cool a bit.
I own a truck. I live in the states. In a state more urban than rural - so less trucks comparatively speaking.
BY FAR - the best part about owning a truck, is being asked to help someone move something big. This couldn’t be more true. Except sometimes the payment can be, or include a single cold beer. My name isn’t Kevin though.
I do this ALL THE TIME-and I love it.
Yup, they already buy their phone on a payment plan for double the price, and get locked into a carrier at inflated rates. Eventually though, they could actually own their phone.
But they’ll just see a lower monthly price tag, and trade in the ability to eventually own the phone.
I could make any de do what I want, but gnome is closest to what I’d build out of the box. And that’s a very simple interface. I particularly like the finger gestures on my laptop touchpad. Once you train your brain, you zoom between desktops and programs on a single screen laptop equivalent to multiple monitors.
Additionally, I’ve found a few simple extensions that I’m sure have kde equivalents, but I’m a creature of habit. Grid is awesome, makes window tiling and snapping awesome. Caffeine for keeping things alive. And a few others. Mostly though it’s just speed of use - especially on the laptop.
One thing though I hate about gnome though is its high dpi monitor scaling support with Wayland when gaming. There’s four or five really dumb things it does. Sometimes it’s easiest to just change the resolution to what you want prior to launching the game.
Agreed. Fedora is great. Although I do prefer gnome.
I mean, it’s always been this way on the internet. Somewhere in the mid to late 90’s, a language and communication program (http and web browsers) became very popular and synonymous with “the internet.” But us old farts remember when Usenet, gopher, ftp, fsp, irc, etc. were all used daily. As the World Wide Web enshittifies, people will either stay or move elsewhere, just like they always did.
The real question in my mind is more akin to the movement between physical networks - such as when we moved away from bbs, to college proprietary connections, and ultimately to the internet. I often wonder why - with all of the portable WiFi radios we all own - why hasn’t anyone created an encrypted protocol and software where we all join our personal hardware into one big giant mesh network? I don’t even live in a city in an apartment and I can pick up 4 neighbor’s WiFi signals, never mind all the cell phones and whatnot passing by my house. You’d think we could have an encrypted and robust way of sending packets to each other by now over our personal private hardware (albeit slow and probably prone to buffering as nodes move in and out of connection range).
Oftentimes I think that’s the next frontier.
Define cheap? Laser printers are expensive but last forever and toner is way cheaper than ink. Short term expensive, long term cheap?
Anyways I have an HL-L8360CDW color laser and it works perfectly with every distro I’ve ever distro hopped to. I’ve changed the black toner exactly twice and I’ve had the printer for almost 9 years now.
There’s newer models and whatnot, but that one works like a champ, is bulletproof, and costs very little per sheet in ink costs. It’s got the bells and whistles too, WiFi Apple AirPrint and whatnot.
Maybe you can find one of those used? Mine seems to be built like a tank, as good as the day I got it new. I’ll probably have it till the day I die.
Edit: and another point I wanted to make, the black only models are much cheaper as well. Color laser is where the cost is. You might be able to find a black only laser printer similar to that model for practically free…
Started making sourdough about 6 months ago. Scaled up my operations and started making 6 at a time. Here’s what I made recently, jalepeno cheddar.
