My Journey into Linux Land

[SactoDoug]

This first post is just me ranting on why I am starting my journey. Future posts will describe what I am doing and how it is going.



I decided that I am going to take the plunge. I have been using Microsoft operating systems since I bought my first computer with DOS 4.0 on it. I stayed on DOS 5.0 until Windows 95 was released. I have been buying the latest Windows every few years as I built a new system.

Over the years I would see mentions of Linux. I never paid much attention to it because I was mostly interested in gaming. It just seemed like a lot of work to just end up with very limited use computer.

My view has changed. Not only has Microsoft been adding ever increasing amounts of bloat to Windows, but they have also integrated spyware into it. I used to install spyware protection on my machines. A number of popular anti-malware companies started out as anti-spyware makers. It is getting increasingly difficult to stop the spyware that is built into the OS. It is not just Microsoft, Google and Apple are just as bad or worse. That is at the OS level. It seems like half of the software makers are doing similar things by selling their user data and/or actively spying on their users. I am sick of it. It is not enough that I pay for their products. They are still so greedy that they still sell my data for a few extra bucks.

I have been using open source software for a while. Switching to open source alternatives for commercial products was not a problem for me. That just left gaming. I have hope for Linux gaming. With SteamOS there is a good number of games available. I have seen more games being added steadily. I checked my own Steam library and found about 1/4 of them are available to run natively. I believe it will grow as time goes on. I hope more developers make their games for SteamOS. It would be good for the industry if there was a real alternative to Windows. I hope it will send a message to Microsoft that what they are doing is not OK.

I will have to keep a Windows machine just to run games that are not available in Linux, but I plan to make Linux my daily driver. The only piece that I am not comfortable with yet is a Linux based phone. I will have to do more research into that before I go that far. I will still have a spy in my pocket for a while longer. Switching to Linux is going to be another step to reclaiming my privacy and when either I am ready or the technology is ready I will look into an open source phone OS without the Google spyware.

[p7m8jg]

I switched to use Linux on an Acer Aspire when Windows insisted I move up from Home to the next level that, naturally, didn't work on my limited SSD because it was too big. Enter Ubuntu linux. Haven't looked back since for that laptop.

I still do use Windows on my desktop, because, well, all the good games run on Windows ( I don't have a Mac).

[SactoDoug]

I decided to take my test drive with Linux Mint installed on a flash drive running on my laptop, a Lenovo Yoga C940. I bought a Samsung 128GB flash drive. I will set it up using Rufus and see how that goes.

[Robotron2k84]

For games, WINE has come a long way. I use a commercial version of it, called crossover, to run most windows games on my Mac. Most everything that is Win32/64 under Steam has no problem under WINE. And, DOSBox for DOS games.

That takes care of 90% of the games you’d encounter, but there are always those that don’t play nice.

I keep a win10 VM around for those.

Most of the same issues you have on Linux for games are the same as on the Mac, so that territory is pretty well covered.

And, no, in no way is MacOS anywhere near as badly borked as Win/Goog/Chrome/etc. Linux / BSDs and MacOS are peers as far as I’m concerned, and everything else is crud.

However, I use Devuan / Debian on the desktop, because F systemd.

[Fastattack]

If you are computer savvy and patient, Linux is a good choice. I've had a Linux rig of one form or another since the 80386 days when the processor was powerful enough to run X Window.

[p7m8jg]

If you are computer savvy and patient, Linux is a good choice. I've had a Linux rig of one form or another since the 80386 days when the processor was powerful enough to run X Window.

IBM 386!!! The good old days of IBM PC, PC-XT, PC-AT etc. etc. etc and QEMM memory manager to get around 64K the limitations of MS-DOS/Windows.

Oh, that takes me back. Monochrome monitors begging to be upgraded to an RGB monitor with a Hercules graphics card. A V20 chip at,dare I say, 8mhz? Or do I mis-remember. Getting more and more common these days (my mis-remembering). So many computers to support, so little time..........

[MrFancyPants]

Linux is great, as long as it can do everything you need it to. I do use Linux, mostly as headless home servers (currently Debian Stretch), but I also primarily run Windows on my computers because it just has way more third party support and available drivers, and that's not likely to change in the near future. Just depends on your needs. Mint is a great option for getting your feet wet with Linux as it's a very easy "plug and play" OS.

[FeuerFrei]

Once you've taken the Linux plunge it's very hard to go back to any MS product and their key code permission slip for use and their bloat and the updates and their lack of backward compatibility and their telemetry and...

My favorite flavor is Mint. Stable and very user friendly. Installs are a cool breeze too.

[Uncivil Engineer]

For a phone you are looking at one of the a of aosp roms. The two I hear most people talk about is lineageOS and grapheneOS. Basically de googled Android. You will want a device that has an unlocked boot loader. There are several to choose from but so your research on unlocking the boot loader.



Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

[SactoDoug]

Tonight was a learning experience. I made the Linux Mint bootable flash drive. I set my laptop to boot from a "USB HDD" as the first option. It kept going into a grub console. I had to have the flash drive plugged in and choose Ubuntu in the BIOS to get it to boot from the flash drive. At first I thought something went wrong with writing the drive so I re-formatted and remade the boot drive three times.

Then I got it to boot into Mint. Things were working. I connected to my network and installed some software. When I restarted everything was back to the way it was as if I had not done anything. I remembered a persistence setting in Rufus. After looking into that I now understand why nothing was saved. I have a steady state install disk. I can re-write the disk with a persistence partition but I don't think that will do what I want. I am going to have to get another flash drive and do a full install from an install flash drive. That will be my project for tomorrow night. At least everything appears to be working when I did get it up and running even if nothing was saved. I was happy that the touch screen monitor works.

[SactoDoug]

I got the full install booting and running from my USB flash drive. Then another wrinkle came up. Bitlocker does not like the boot changes. I had to get my bitlocker recovery key. Then it required me to enter the key every time I went back to Windows after I had been using Linux. So I removed Bitlocker since that was getting to be a real PITA. On the plus side, I can now see my Windows hard drive when I am in Linux.

[randomBytes]

I've never run Dos or Windows on my computers, oh actually not true, about 15 years ago, I had a laptop from work that had Windows on half the disk - I tried to use it once, since I was at a conference that was using wifi authentication which at that time was *only* available for Windows... so I tried booting Windows; my laptop ran out of battery before it finished booting.

That laptop normally ran NetBSD. These days my work laptops run OS/X.
My desktops have been NetBSD or FreeBSD for past 30 years.
We also use Linux at work, but not a big fan.

[Big Chudungus]

I'm planning to turn an older 64bit laptop into dual boot because I want to use some Windows programs but don't want them "calling home" or getting updates and other helpful things, but it would be nice to have basic WWW access for downloading files and general websurfing, shopping etc.

Will that work? Could I turn off all WWW access in Windows, run Linux and download a file from WWW, then shutdown Linux, then boot Windows and find the file and use it in a Windows program?
Does Linux play nice with online banking and shopping? Every once is a while I'd not be able to do online banking/school and they'd tell me to try it in MS Internet Explorer, but that was years ago.

I've got an otherwise perfectly good 32bit laptop and want to make it a pure Linux but it wont take the 32bit Linux disc I burned or take it from thumbdrive or direct download and the trouble shooting instructions are all Greek to me. I'm looking at dozens of pages of documentation and manuals just to get 32bit Linux on a standard ex-Windows PC and no one seems to want to tell me how to "just make it work". Maybe I'll hire some kid off Craigslist to do it in 2 minutes and make me feel old and stupid. Did Bill Gates suddenly become the richest man in the world because he understood not everyone wants or can learn years worth of back end cryptic computer stuff just to make an unrelated program work, or at least understood stealing that concept from Jobs AND pushing it as a standard if mediocre system was the way to go?

[SactoDoug]

If you don't want Windows to connect to anything, then the easiest way to stop it is to turn off WiFi and delete your connections. Obviously do not plug in a network cable if you have one attached.

I can't help you on getting Linux running since I am certainly no expert on it. Linux comes with drivers so most of the times it should work immediately. If you are using Mint, then run Driver Manager. Also do an update soon after it starts.

[ldsnet]

Lots of desktop options for Linux if you are savvy enough to deal with the differences.... getting away from Chrome and Google and a phone is a whole different ballgame.
There are Linux phones out there, but Very limited and no app support (you will be rolling your own for every app). They bluntly state the target audience for current Linux phone is the software developer.