this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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I currently use Windows 10 and I’d like to try out Linux. My plan is to set up a dual boot with OpenSUSE tumbleweed and KDE Plasma. I’ve read so many different opinions about choosing a distro, compatibility with gaming and Nvidia drivers, and personal issues with the ethos of different companies like Canonical. I value privacy and I’d rather avoid a Linux distro that’s implementing something like ads or telemetry…if that’s even a thing that’s happening?

As a complete beginner, what sort of advice would you all have for me? Should I avoid OpenSUSE or KDE Plasma for some reason? Are there any ‘10 things to do first when installing Linux for the first time’ recommendations?

Despite all the ‘beginner friendly’ guides and tutorials around, I still feel a little lost and like I’m going into this blind.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who's offered advice, I really appreciate all the help and the patience with my dumb questions! There's a lot to look through and it's been a busy day for me, but I'll get back to reading through everything and replying as soon as I can!

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

My big question would be why are you starting with a dual boot? I would recommend trying each one with a liveUSB or in a virtual machine and simply do a single boot with the one you like better. There’s likely little need for you to actually maintain two distros unless you have a very niche use case that one distro can’t solve.

My advice would be to just relax and realize that the underlying OS is 90% the same regardless of what distro you choose. All the discussion you see on different distros, package managers, snaps, wayland, etc. are all the other 10%. It really doesn’t matter what distro you start on as long as it’s a general purpose distro (both of the ones in your OP are): once you learn the first 90% of linux, you’ll develop your own tastes, and then you’ll be able to decide on the remaining 10%.

[–] CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV 17 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I think he wants to dual boot tumbleweed and windows, not two linux distros.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Yeah. I probably should have been more clear about that.

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[–] Quazatron 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is the sensible thing to do. Try a bunch of distros using either USB or as Virtual Machines.

It'll save you a lot of heartache when you eventually kill the bootloader, the display driver or both (and you will, it is part or the learning process).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand the issue here. Does that mean I can kill my BIOS bootloader somehow? Or the display driver? And how would screwing up drivers on one SSD with Linux affect my other SSD with Windows? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I'm just trying to get my head around as much of this as I can.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Windows likes to pretend it's the only OS in the world so it can overwrite the bootloader and you lose access to the Linux install.

But if you use separate disks for each there's a simple solution if your BIOS has a quick boot selection: install each bootloader on its respective disk and use the BIOS selector at boot.

Alternatively, install the Linux bootloader on the Linux disk; it will autodetect Windows and offer it as a boot option, but Windows won't be aware of Linux. In BIOS you set Linux as permanent boot disk in this case.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I want to maintain my Windows 10 install for now as a sort of fallback. I have a lot of random software installed for my university classes, and I don’t know about all the compatibility issues I might face with those. And letting it sit there in the background in case I need it for something feels safer than jumping head first into a new OS.

Trying out liveUSB or VM stuff seemed like it would be an extra hurdle in transitioning to Linux. Like, I want to get settled in and actually use it as a daily thing, not just browse the internet a bit here and there. If I don’t like the distro I choose, I can always just install another one, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Oh, my misunderstanding, I thought you wanted to dual boot OpenSuse and KDE Plasma. Dual booting Windows 10 and one of those makes way more sense, especially if you have niche university software that was probably written 20 years ago for Windows XP service pack 2, is already barely compatible with Windows 10, and almost certainly never had a linux version. You definitely don’t want to gamble on abandoning Windows completely until after you graduate.

And yes, once you get comfortable installing a distro, it gets pretty easy to just install a new one.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

A live USB would let you play around in a desktop environment for a bit to see if you like it before jumping in the deep end with it. But if you've already tried out KDE plasma and know you'll like it, then you're probably fine. I agree that you won't become familiar with a full distro without data persistence and repeated use.

Maybe at least live boot gnome if you haven't tried that one yet. Gnome and KDE are the most fully featured desktop environments, so they're natural choices for users coming from win/mac.

Yeah, you can always install another, but if you are going to do that every day or two before settling on one, maybe consider installing virtual box and trying out the distros like that first. Of course, if you're in a VM, it can be a challenge to get proper hardware acceleration if you're going to try out gaming.

At the end of the day, I think dual booting is a good idea, as long as you only use windows when it's your only option. That's what I do. It's easy enough to reboot if I need to play a game or use a windows specific app. More consistent than dealing with QEMU or something.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

It's a bit of an unpopular opinion, but if you pick a mainstream distro there isn't a lot of difference between them. Especially to somebody who is new to linux.

With most any distro you can use KDE, gnome and other desktop environments. You can pick which one you want to use when you login. So don't think you're tying yourself to KDE if you install kubuntu or something.

If you want an easy way to switch to a new distro make sure you create a separate partition for /home. Then if/when you want to install something new you can have it overwrite everything except your home directory. So all your steam configs and games will be left untouched (for example). Alternatively just backup /home somewhere and restore as you need.

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[–] Ibaudia 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For Nvidia I would recommend Pop!_OS since it makes things really easy. Either that or Debian with KDE. More mainstream = more users = better support.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Linux Mint works really well with Nvidia, too!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I keep hearing good things about both of those. They're the first two distros on my list to try out after OpenSUSE.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Keep notes on what you do including outcomes. You can always reinstall, skip all of the extra crap you didn't need to mess around with and have a good clean system without having to back track.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

From https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Take_notes

Take notes.

It's easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you're trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it's easy to forget which method was successful the next day!

It's a very good idea to take notes about the software you've installed and configuration changes you've made. When editing configuration files, it's also a very good idea to include comments in the file explaining the reason for the changes and the date they were made.

This has saved me so much grief. If ever I mess up a system so badly that I want to re-install or when I want to set up a new machine, having a clear set of notes makes it a breeze.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!

History with Fish makes this easy

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is an awesome distro with up to date packages. KDE is also a great choice, especially with Plasma 6.0 around the corner.

I wouldn't worry too much about Nvidia drivers, just follow OpenSUSE's guide [1]. The remaining issues of Nvidia with KDE Wayland are getting fixed over the coming months.

Edit: OpenSUSE can't ship some codecs by default for legal reasons (like RedHat, Fedora), but makes it simple to enable them (optionally through graphical YaST) [2].

[1] https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

[2] https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_repositories

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[–] Rustmilian 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If you run into any issues or if you're not sure how to do something, feel free to ask.
I'll do my best to point you in the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Thank you! I’d welcome advice on any of the other replies I’ve made so far, and if I have any more specific questions I’ll give you a shout!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

If you're going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).

Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5's UX the main reason I didn't like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn't do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.

It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn't know how (and still don't even now).

If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.

 

And for the record I don't like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.

 

If you don't mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.

Pacman (Arch's package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there's the AUR on top.

Also while I've never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Hello OP, warm welcome to the schizophrenic community that is linux! I’m running this exact same setup as you intend to.

Couple of points I’d add:

  1. Nvidia and linux is a shit show. You either use the gimped mesa drivers (not so good), or the closed source drivers (even worse), especially on Wayland. If you still want to try it out, I suggest you stick with X11. I was using a 3080Ti and gave up trying to get it to work on Wayland+KDE Plasma v5 without screen glitches and bought a 7900XTX instead. AMD works out of the box without further configuration. I’ve had nothing but issues with Nvidia. For the GPU neckbeards that are going to achytually me, please don’t, I have no skin in this game as I have a bunch of cards from both.

  2. I am not a pro nor expert in the foundations of linux, but I more or less know my way around its fundamentals (enough not to get into too much trouble), so I would actually suggest not getting into a rolling-releasing distro like Tunbleweed until you are super comfortable with a little hands-on and figuring shit out. Pop!_OS might be a better bet for your use case for now because it comes bundled with Nvidia drivers, but it uses a GNOME derivative (cosmic DE) so you don’t actually get the KDE experience.

Having said these, I absolutely adore Tumbleweed and KDE, I’ve been half daily-driving it but the gaming experience is not the absolute best (be prepared to experience weird glitches and crashes). If a flawless gaming experience is non-negotiable to you, stick with Windows. But if you’re ready to explore the quirky wonders of linux, the beauty of it all is the experience and the real reward is the friends you make along the way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm also a beginner and I noticed that debian let me install a lot of possible desktops. So I installed all of them, and I can switch on the password screen which one to open. I'm trying some stuff this way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Regardless of the distro, you can install as many desktops you want. It doesn't have to be during the OS's installation screen.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

OpenSUSE + KDE is a really solid choice, I'd say.

The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn't Windows. Don't expect things to works the same.
Don't try too hard to re-configure things that don't match the way things are on Windows. If there isn't an easy way to get a certain behavior, there's probably a reason for it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you have a spare solid state drive or a portable HDD (most USB sticks are a bit too slow for a proper install), maybe install a Linux distribution onto that portable device, then you can just boot from that, then you only need to boot switch in Bios to Windows when you need to use it again. This has the advantage of you not needing to setup a complicated dual boot setup. When you are settled in with Linux, open your drive where Windows is located from Linux, copy your files over (don't forget your bookmarks and saved passwords) and then you can clone your linux install from your portable drive over your old Windows install using a tool such as dd.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the advice. I plan on adding another internal SSD and installing Linux on that. I should have been more specific in my original post.

You’re saying I can access the filesystem on my windows drive from Linux? So I could directly copy files back and forth? I thought I’d have to copy them onto an external drive, reboot, and then copy to the Linux drive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

The response you got above is the best advice. Get a second internal drive of any type and size, and install distros on that. You totally can partition your existing windows drive and install linux alongside it, but… you’ll probably screw something up along the way and bork your windows install. Use another drive and it’s much harder to do. If you want to be super safe, you can unplug your windows drive during installs and then it’s literally impossible to break your windows drive.

The other advantage is that nobody knows what distro will be right for you. That means you’ll want to distro hop - and that’s so much easier when you have another drive you can just format and start over with (and not worry about your boot loader).

To your follow up question, yes, linux can read and write to the contents of your windows drive. If you mount that drive, then you can do whatever you want to it, including deleting things that break your windows installation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

If you encounter problems you can't find information on, do Ubuntu LTS next and use askununtu.com, help.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com. The existing documentation and the largest community is what makes this the easiest option. Once you gain XP for a couple of years that XP is transferrable to Debian.

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