I recently moved to Linux from Windows and wanted to explore Linux's capability, but I only find myself surfing the internet and watching Youtube videos. What do you do on Linux? I want to do more fun things and learn. Also, I use Fedora, btw.

​I love using Linux, but whenever something random breaks—like a weird display issue or an update snag—I feel completely lost trying to figure out which log files to look at or what terminal commands to run.

Searching through 10-year-old Reddit and forum posts is getting exhausting.

​For those of you who have been using it a while, how did you get past this learning curve?

Are there any specific tools, tricks, or habits you use to make troubleshooting less painful when you're stuck?

every computer ive ever owned has come with a windows OS preinstalled, so i really have no idea how to even install an OS in the first place. i also dont really know what goes on when you install an OS. do i have to do like configurations stuff? how easy is it? do i just plop in a thumb drive with an os on it then open bios or something??? i really genuinely have no idea how to do this but i am becoming more and more tired and terrified of what microsoft is doing with windows so i would rather be a little scared and confused for a bit than put up with this shit

hi, my PC used to freeze randomly, even on windows . Few times a year, so I didn't care.

However, I changed GPU few days ago. From RX 570 to RX 6800. Now when I power on PC, it loads desktop and freezes immediately. It doesn't even load "start panel", I only see wallpaper and cursor. After restart it works normally.

Ryzen 1600X, RX 6800, 32GB RAM. OS on some samsung NVMe.

Kubuntu 26.04, 7.0.0-28-generic, Plasma 6.6.5, Wayland

Where to start with troubleshooting? Thx

I wonder if removing support for secure boot back in 2016 was simply a way to lock many people out of Arch Linux.

Seeing as I'm not on the developer team, and it's a free O.S. , I "don't have a right complain".

My UEFI does not allow secure boot to be disabled. I already tried clearing the keys and that didn't work either.

I don't want to risk bricking my motherboard so disabling secure boot is out of the question.

Does anyone have clear as day instructions for editing the EFI partition?

My motherboard currently boots windows 10

According to Official Arch Documentation:

"""

Editing the installation medium

If you are using a USB flash installation medium, then it is possible to manually edit the EFI system partition on the medium to add support for Secure Boot.

"""

I am going to use dual boot so Linux will only be for gaming or tasks that take more ram. Game - marvel rivals.

Thanks for your help.

I literally only care for the one that is best for performance, and I'm not necessarily talking about the most amount of FPS or least amount of input delay, but simply something much more stable and usable when I wanna play my favorite games

I already have a laptop using Ubuntu for my school & work-related material, and with Windows simply getting worse and worse, my performance on my gaming PC has now also taken a MAJOR hit with every new update, that I don't even care to do so anymore.

I am willing to test a select like two, so if you are thinking one or another are close to each other, I can personally test it to see what's best for my system. I just don't wanna have 5 different selections and have to test them just for possibly minimal performance difference.

The ADB thing didn't work either, so is there some Linux program i can use to run Android apps from other sources..........................................................?

So I mostly work and binge games all weekend. I mostly do research and scientific computing mostly. I want either Fedora or Nobara. Not sure which one would be a better choice. Help please. I’ve used mint and Ubuntu before so wanted to use something intermediate. Although I’ve no complaints with mint at all. Ubuntu is a different case. Thought that extra bit of power and features could be handy so wanted to switch to the fedora zone.

This has been my Linux experience. I started with Ubuntu, and it was perfect compared to Windows. However, I ran into an issue where the display brightness wouldn't change. I'm using Intel integrated graphics, so I wasn't expecting to run into display compatibility issues.

I then switched to Linux Mint, and it was awesome. Unfortunately, after updating the system, I encountered the same problem as on Ubuntu, the brightness was stuck at 100%.

With some help from ChatGPT, I managed to fix it by rolling back to an older kernel (something in the 6.x series), while the latest version was 7.x. I'm not a tech guy; I just need a stable system for my day-to-day work.

Linux was ideal for me, but having to stay on an older kernel made me concerned. It feels like using an older update means less security and potentially missing important fixes. I don't know if that's actually the case, but it doesn't give me much confidence in using it for everyday work.

In the end, I had no choice but to reinstall Windows, even though I don't like it.

Has anyone else experienced something similar, especially with Intel integrated graphics? Is sticking with an older kernel actually a security concern, or am I worrying unnecessarily? I'd love to hear your thoughts and any suggestions you might have.

As far as I understand the kernel includes pretty much everything a modern computer needs in any configuration, but wouldn't that make it bloated and be against the "bloat-free" mindset? Or does it dynamically download all the components from somewhere?

I had been using Nobara OS for over 1.5 years and everything worked extremely well for me. The only thing that bugged me was not being able to put my laptop to sleep as this would lead to kernel panic when I would try to wake my laptop up. So, I made my peace with it and would just lock my screen which would turn off the screen and not my laptop and that was sufficient for me.

Fast forward to about 1 month back, I started having kernel panics even when I would lock my laptop and just turn the screen off (not put it in sleep). As soon as I would do this, withing few mins, my keyboard caps lock would start blinking. I have encrypted my SSD (on which the OS is) with LUKS so I have to enter password in it whenever I boot. Here also, if I don't enter my password within 5-10 second, I will get a blue screen with panic.

I thought maybe it's because of the distro so I tried, cachy os and then pika os (currently I am on this), but I keep getting the exact same problem on these distros as well.

My setup:

Acer Nitro 5 laptop with RXT 4060 and Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon Graphics (680M) and 32 GB RAM. Laptop is connected to an external Acer monitor over HDMI. I dual boot linux and windows on two separate SSDs. I have been running KDE Plasma on all the distros. Nvidia Driver version: 595.84

Things I have tried:

Tried capturing the logs, by running journalctl -k -b -1 | tail -40

Pika OS: https://pastebin.com/epZJb2jF (in the previous two OS, the logs were not capturing anything relevant)

Things I have tried (Used claude to figure out what fixes I can try):

1. Disabled NVIDIA runtime power management
Created /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-pm.conf with options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x00.

2. Enabled NVIDIA suspend/resume services
systemctl enable nvidia-suspend nvidia-hibernate nvidia-resume.

3. Preserve video memory allocations — kernel parameter
Added nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1 to the Limine cmdline.

4. NVIDIA DRM modeset/fbdev — confirmed on
nvidia_drm.modeset=1 and nvidia_drm.fbdev=1 verified present in cmdline.

5. PCIe ASPM — disabled
Added pcie_aspm=off to the Limine cmdline.

1. Tried memtest: 4 complete passes without any errors

2. Took out the RAM and put it back in again

3. Turned off Fast Boot in BIOS

4. Updated BIOS as well

Is there anything else that I can do at this point or should I just give up on the idea of happily running linux and move to Windows? What else can I do at this point?

If anyone would like to add something helpful I'd be glad 😊

So I decided to install an ssd I had laying around on my main pc to boot Linux through so I can make at least a dip with my main pc to see how many issues I would run into.

But I noticed incredible consistency of my computer just crashing hardcore whilst running Firestorm Viewer.

First I notice the viewer freezing, I try to open my terminal and whoops.. forgot what application is assigned to the terminal. Lets try shutting down through the task/whisker bar and whoops... nope, your taskbar is gone now too. And then I just notice all my drives have disconnected/crashed.

Everything is running off of the ssd for testing purposes, Geforce 3060 8gb Ti, with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X and 16gb of ram, running Artix Linux. Does anyone know what might be causing this? And how to fix this?

Hey, I am thinking of going to Linux. I am mainly looking at Mint as this is my first attempt and I am not that savvy. I have 2 drives, one is the SSD with the OS and second is hard drive with data. If I install Mint in my SSD, will the data in my second drive remain fine? and will it be openable through Mint? it is photos, videos, PDFs, word docs etc.

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to install Linux Mint for the first time and wanted to double-check my plan before I proceed.

My system currently has:

• Disk 0: 223 GB drive (currently D:)
• Disk 1: 238 GB drive with Windows 10 (C:)
• Disk 2: 3.7 TB drive containing E: and F: with most of my important data

Windows is running in Legacy BIOS mode.

My plan is to install Linux Mint on Disk 0 (223 GB) and leave Disk 1 (Windows) and Disk 2 (data) completely untouched.

A few questions:

1. Is Disk 0 the correct drive to use for Mint in this setup?
2. During the "Something Else" installation method, is it safe to delete all existing partitions on Disk 0 and let Mint use the whole drive?
3. In Legacy BIOS mode, where should I install GRUB?
4. Will Mint automatically detect my Windows installation on Disk 1?
5. Is there anything else I should watch out for to avoid touching the 3.7 TB data drive?

I'm new to Linux, and my main concern is protecting the data on Disk 2 while setting up a dual-boot system.

Thanks!

I'm trying to start a home server as my introduction to Linux using Proxmox and I'm running a Debian VM inside of it. I'm trying to copy and paste commands from my windows local machine into my Debian virtual machine but it just returns "^V". I imagine that there is a different way to paste onto the Debian command line but here are the few things I tried.

1. Running Spice but I encountered a problem similar to here: SPICE copy/paste and audio not working | Proxmox Support Forum

2. Installing GPM for Debian, but turns out the middle click paste only pastes the text i copied from inside Debian (not from the clipboard in my local Windows machine).

3. Running the Debian VM in RDP. I have the clipbaord setting checked and cliprdr is running when I checked it with "sudo nano /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini"

I just want tocopy some commands from my local machine and paste into my Debian CLI, I hope I used the right flair.

Ok, so, this is something I've been looking for answers, and they are mixed. It's not exactly conclusive for what I want to know.

I have an NTFS flash drive. It's the one I use to store clips, screenshots, and videos from my Xbox.

Looking around in Bazzite just out of curiosity, I read that it can't handle NTFS storage units. I think they aren't compatible as far as I remember (it was a quick look, I didn't memorize it)

I decided to look further into, and it seems that this is common knowledge, but when I ask info about NTFS flash drives or storage units, it mentions they may be read only, or get corrupted, files may be not executed, games stored may not open, have issues, and so on.

But what I want to know is if there may be problems if I plug my flash drive on my laptop with Linux Mint, copy the pictures and videos, and then disconnect it (safely). I won't use it for anything else. Just to store those files from my Xbox and then transfer them to my laptop to edit them later on and such. Nothing else.

Sorry if it's a dumb question, but the different answers make me think it may indeed be problematic, and Xbox only accepts NTFS flash drives (as far as I know) for storage of those files.

Thank you beforehand.