So i really wanted to ditch windows once and for all so i’ve tried Linux for a week trying different distros (debian, manjaro, ubuntu, opensuse, mint) and first of all why? Why are there so many distros out there? What’s the difference between debian + kde and manjaro + kde? They look the same, they work the same. I don’t get it. Also why do things have to be complicated? I’ve installed debian, installed calibre to manage my ebooks, created a library from an existing library on my hard drive (not the one with debian installed), ERROR! All the files are read-only. What???? I’ve followed multiple guides on how to change permissions and finally solved the problem. Now let’s restart my pc. files on the hard drive are read only WHAT???? Fuck debian, let’s go on manjaro. No problems at all on calibre. Managed to create the library as easy as i did on windows. My question is: where’s the fun in this? It’s just problems, after problems, after problems and i didn’t even start gaming. I mean i tried installing retroarch and importing my saves but of course nothing works. Read this guide, read that guide. Nope. Nothing works. Ok, fuck retroarch let’s customize the appearance of my desktop: move some icons on the panel, center this, adjust height, move this on the left, spent 30 minutes tweaking, very nice… kde crashes, all back to default. Let’s download some apps. I want as many apps that i already know as possible. Let’s see if jdownloader is available for linux. Yep there’s one. Nope, not for manjaro (officially). There’s a AUR package available. Nice. What do i need to do to install a AUR package? A wall of text on the wiki, 20 minutes videos, yay. Ok let’s call it a day. Do i need to live another life to make linux work?
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Why?
Why? Choose one and stick with it, preferably a beginner friendly one like Ubuntu or Mint.
Because different people like different things and have different opinions. Some people like to have the latest packages and so they choose Arch, while others prefer to have a stable system until they want to upgrade core packages and so they go with Ubuntu.
One is Debian based and the other in Arch based. Debian uses apt, Arch uses pacman. Debian has a slower release cycle to ensure compatibility while Arch has a faster release cycle to ensure the latest versions of things are available. Like these there are thousands of small differences between any two distros. It's mostly philosophical, so just pick something beginner friendly and stick with it until you find a reason to switch.
They don't work 100% the same, that's like saying that a car and a truck are the same because they're both painted black and have a steering wheel. Under the hood they're very different.
They're not, they're different. Doing stuff on Windows is also complicated if you don't know what you're doing, excepts you've had years of experience, in a few years Linux will feel easy and Windows complicated.
Is the entire hard-drive read only? How did you mount it? What format is it on? You're skipping a lot of important questions, that if you had answered (or asked about this issue) you would know the problem. My guess is that you don't have ntfs-3g installed and the drive was NTFS.
How? This might give us an idea of what was wrong with it.
Yes, makes sense, did you applied a permanent fix or a temporary one? Since we don't know what you did we have to assume you did a temporary fix, so it's like asking why did Firefox not opened after I restarted my computer if I had open it before.
That's a bad reason to switch distros, if you switch distros every time you run into something you don't understand you're going to run out of distros fairly quickly. Let me tell you right now, EVERYTHING one distro can do another one can, no exceptions. Something not working is a bad reason to switch distros unless you know why the other distro makes it work and are okay with the philosophical differences between distros.
The same thing that's causing you problems is an awesome feature, Linux is very modular, you can build yourself your system exactly the way you want it. That is very fun.
Well, yeah, it's an unfamiliar thing, I feel the same every time I have to use Windows.
Why not? AFAIK RetroArch should have cross compatible saves.
Did you saved in the meantime? Let his be a lesson, save often, you never know when something will happen.
That's weird, I don't remember last time KDE crashed, but then again I'm not using Manjaro so maybe the current version there is broken? What was the error? Did you submitted a bug report? That might be an important finding.
Not nice, don't use AUR on Manjaro, you will break stuff.
That's because AUR is not meant for people who don't know what they're doing. It's dangerous and unstable, the way to get an air package is to build it yourself, the way to get an automated tool to install them is to build the package for it yourself, this should prevent people who shouldn't be building packages from doing so. BTW, Manjaro is especially unsafe because it has an AUR manager in their official repos IIRC, which btw is called yay, so not sure if that was a joke.
No, you just need time to learn something new, instead of jumping around thinking that things would solve themselves. If you had started with Ubuntu you might not had either of those problems, and if you had learned what was wrong with the first problem on the first distro you would know how to fix it in every other distro and solve similar problems, just like you did with Windows before and now solving things there is intuitive for you.
I’ve used win11 and didn’t like it. Time’s ticking.
Yada, yada, yada.
Things to do to install an app on Windows: download the exe, double click on the icon, follow the instructions, done. Things to do to install an app on Linux: check the package manager, if the app is not there go on their website, cross your fingers, copy and paste x lines in the terminal, cross your fingers (had problems with windscribe, enpass, spotify), wget command not found, install wget, retry, cross your fingers one last time, done (?).
Man, there are hundreds (nonsense) distros out there, i need something like 3 lives to try them all.
Apparently not. I’ve saved a copy of the saves folder and simply pasted it in the retroarch folder on linux but the game doesn’t read anything.
There were no errors. Screen went black and then everything was reset.
This is actually fun: i have Ubuntu Budgie on my laptop and i was trying to create a bootable win10 on my pendrive with ventoy given that jesus christ woeusb is super complicated to install with all those manual dependencies installs and woeusb-ng gives problem with python. Installed ventoy, copied the iso, pasted it, nothing shows up in the drive. Copied the iso again, pasted it again, file already existing. ????. I’ve extracted the drive, plugged it back in, nothing. Extracted it again, plugged it in on my desktop, iso is actually there. Wtf is wrong with linux?
I see a common trend here. You seem to be very tech savvy and a windows power user, and get frustrated with Linux because you're trying to solve problems with a windows mentality and failing.
That yada yada yada is the most important part from my entire answer, choose a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.
Nope, things to install an app on Windows: Open a browser, search for the program, click the wrong link, download a virus, go back, try again, find a more reputable site, download another virus, run anti-virus, discover your computer has been completely overrun by viruses, format, reinstall everything, find the right site, download the installer, click next 20 times, accept to have a new service running when you start your PC by accident, done?. You don't do all of that every time? That's because you know what you're doing, I certainly don't do half the stuff you mentioned for Linux.
That's it, if it's not there you shouldn't worry with it until you're a bit more experienced. This is why I recommend beginner friendly distro a, they will have more stuff and possibly have snaps/flatpacks by default which should cover most of your use ases and are installed via the same GUI.
Precisely my point, don't. Pick a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.
Have you tried saving something new to see if we have the correct folder?
That's crashing, there should be some log somewhere, can you reproduce or is it random?
Did you installed Ventoy properly on the drive? Did you unmounted before removing the first time? Otherwise you might have corrupted the file, remember how people always say to eject before unplugging a USB drive? This is the reason, the GUI that shows you copying stuff is just a FE to the calls to the kernel for writing, the kernel actual writing to the disk is done afterwards, so even after the GUI closes the file was not totally written. Again, regardless of OS, unmount/eject drives before unplugging them. Also is your desktop Linux or windows? Does the bootable drive works? You need to learn to provide more information if you expect help, saying "stuff doesn't work, what's wrong with Linux?" Will get you a lot of answers of the type "the problem is between the keyboard and the chair".
I won’t choose any distro. I chose to stick with windows. I spent 1,5 hours setting EVERYTHING UP. Apps, accounts, settings, everything. I spent the exact same trying to figure out why the fuck steam is not automatically downloading dependencies as it did on my laptop and didn’t even get an answer.
I’ve never, ever got a virus on any of my pcs. I grew up with internet, since the ADSL days, i know my shit.
Some of the apps i use are very important to me and some of them don’t have packages so i had to rely on commands in the terminal.
I was not expecting any help actually. The amount of problems i encountered is too much. The past 3 days dealing with linux have been extremely stressful. No wonder linux is still super niche. I can fairly say that i’ve been reckless going for non beginners distros but linux has problems, huge problems.
Therein lies the problem, you're a windows expert, moving away from your comfort zone will always feel bad. It's okay to stick to Windows, no one should be forced to use an OS they don't like. But if you ever want to try again, I recommend taking a step back and accepting that for all your years of experience in Windows you are a noob here, and trying to jump into the deep end is more likely to get you drowned than learning how to swim.
Also I recommend dual-booting, so you have the safe heaven of a known OS to reboot into in times of need. Most of us started that way and dealt slowly with the difficulties in using Linux with a windows user mentality, until at some point we realized we were spending the majority of our time in Linux and Windows had become unusable because we were now thinking like Linux users. I'm sure that if I had tried to do what you did I would also be frustrated, so I completely understand you. But let me tell you something which you might not want to hear, and will possibly even get angry at me for telling you, but there's a fairly good chance that the majority of issues you encountered were self-imposed. Linux has near infinite possibilities, but that's like saying the ocean is nearly infinite, it doesn't mean you should try to swim across it just because you're used to doing it on a swimming pool, you'll drown fairly quickly and get nowhere.
How? I’ve installed Debian with KDE, downloaded the .deb from steam website, learnt to install that using sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb, opened the app and i’ve been welcomed with a text inviting me to press enter to continue, pretty simple. The program downloaded stuff, steam is ready now. Not bad. Repeated the exact same thing on Debian with xfce, that apparently doesn’t come with a software installer, nothing works. An alert says i need to download dependencies (i know dpkg doesn’t resolve dependencies). Where’s the “enter to continue”? How is this my fault??
Mistake number 1, Debian is not beginner friendly.
Mistake number 2, this is windows mentality, if it's not in the package manager it's too advanced for you for the time being. Beginner friendly distros would have had steam in their package manager.
You could have also double clicked the Deb file, but this is a bad way, dpkg does not resolve dependencies, so you would need to figure those out and install them by hand, which can be tedious at best.
You lucked out, your system had all of the requirements met.
No such luck therez remember when I told you to use the package manager? This is why. Possibly missing something stupid like an i32 library, which you could manually install, but you shouldn't, you're making things hard for yourself for no reason other than wanting to avoid beginner friendly distros.
It's your fault because like I've been saying since the beginning you're trying to use Linux as if it were Windows and getting frustrated because it behaves differently. Trying to do this will be frustrating and you will become angry because nothing works like you expect, but you must understand that it's not that things don't work, it's that they work differently.
You might be thinking this is stupid, an installer should install everything it needs, right? Nope, that's a windows mentality, in Linux the main idea is that an installer only installs what it's supposed to, any dependency should be system-wide. Why you might ask? Simple, imagine if every single GUI app had to include it's own copy of the full GUI library it uses, your system would quickly become bloated, not only that but each program would open it's own copy of the library using more and more memory, not to mention the interoperability problems between programs using different versions of the same library. In Linux the standard is for programs to use system libraries, it's the convention, just like how on Windows it is to not (which has its own set of problems). This is why package managers are important, they're not just downloading an executable and running it, they're doing lots of stuff behind the curtains, all of it can be done manually, but like you found out it's troublesome, so best is to avoid.
If i got a beginner friendly distro how will i learn how to use linux properly?
So if an app is not a package manager i'm fucked?
I tried, it did nothing, i went online to search for a solution.
This is mental. This shouldn't be a thing even for pros. I need 15 minutes to install an app? Sorry i won't go out this evening, i need to install an app and god knows what can happen.
Well, yes, of course. Also i read some contradictions in your post: the installer only installs what is supposed to, but it needs dependencies to actually make the app usable. But that's what package managers do, right? Different apps could use the same libraries but also different ones, so the system could become bloated nonetheless. I don't see how is this beneficial for the user.
That's like asking how will you learn to swim if you start in a pool where you can reach the bottom. First of all under the hood Ubuntu and Gentoo are 99% the same, the main differences are philosophical, almost everything you learn for Ubuntu will carry over to any other distro. But if you try jumping straight into the deep end you will be overwhelmed. I mentioned Gentoo because you usually compile your own kernel when using it, how can you possibly learn Linux without compiling your own kernel!? But the majority of people who know Linux nowadays have never done so, and you shouldn't need to either. The same applies to all the thousand paper cuts you're inflicting to yourself for choosing a distro whose philosophy doesn't include being beginner friendly.
For the time being, yes. But here's the thing, if everything else is working, figuring out how to install a package manually is simple, but if you're struggling with 100 other things you will be overwhelmed by it. Tell me, when was the last time you downloaded an .APK from a random site on the internet to install something on your phone? It's the same thing.
Weird, that used to work last I used Debian based with KDE.
Nope, I could install that in 1 min, because I know what I'm doing, so I know how to install dependencies. But you don't, so you shouldn't try to install stuff manually. For starters I would have added a PPA instead of manually installing a .deb, that way the package would get updated and apt would install the dependencies automatically, if that wasn't an option or I was feeling lazy I would have just installed using snap/flatpacks, or if I had to install using a .deb, I would just use apt to do it to autoresolve dependencies. The fact that half of what I said there sounds like gibberish is the reason why you shouldn't do it. It's equivalent of someone who can't even use Android properly asking you how to install an APK not on the play store, first learn the basics, then you can do complex stuff.
No contradictions, let's go over one by one
Yes, but each dependency is its own package, so when you install one package you might be installing several. But if you try to install one package manually (via dpkg) you don't get the packages it depends on (because dpkg is a glorified unzip, it doesn't know how to fetch dependencies).
Exactly, unlike dpkg, apt does know how to install the dependencies, so it would do it automatically.
Yes, but you're missing the point, a single library doesn't weight that much, a dozen copies of that same library do. You installed KDE, so you probably had these apps (among others):
The KDE library is 150/200MB, so on Windows each of those application on it's own weights at least 200MB, so probably you're looking at 2GB for 10 apps that use the KDE library. On Linux they weight very small amount, because all of them use the same KDE library which is installed system-wide. Maybe some of those also use other libraries, but if you install anything else that uses that same library the library won't be duplicated the same way it is on Windows, where each installer is self-contained and brings all of the libraries it needs to work.
There are two main advantages:
And the disadvantages are:
So overall it has 2 huge benefits and no downsides as long as you use the package manager.
It was Debian with xfce.
Wasn't this the OS of freedom? Hmmm
I tried to install ISO image writer on Ubuntu, on my laptop. Went straight to the package manager, no terminal bullshit, downloaded it, open button is greyed out. Fantastic. Stable version btw. Solved by uninstalling and installing another version available on the manager. Linux is literally problems after problems after problems.
Like, download the APK, enable Unknown sources, tap on the icon? I don't use android since 2017 but i'm pretty sure is the same, isn't it? Not an happy comparison.
When i want to uninstall and app and all the dependencies connected to it (autoremove, right?) is Linux able to tell if some of those dependencies are necessary for other apps and "whitelist" them?
Yes, you're also free to shoot yourself in the foot. Do what you want, I'm trying to prevent you from hurting yourself, but you're free to do so of you so wish.
Ubuntu already comes with an iso image writer.
What program? How did you run it? What are you trying to do, you need to be a lot more specific,
Package managers only have one version, so that shouldn't be possible.
Again, at least once you didn't installed it via the package manager, so at least once you shot yourself in the foot. I'm guessing it was the first time, and you installed a snap/flatpacks which maybe required especial permissions for accessing USB devices.
Yes, it's the same, try explaining that to your grandma who doesn't know how to answer a call and you'll quickly tell her to first learn to use the basics before wanting to enable external sources and installing random stuff from the internet.
Yes, it keeps track of which things use what, autoremove removes things that were installed as dependencies but nothing else depends on them now. So for example if you uninstall Ark and that was the only thing using unzip, running autoremove would get rid of the unzip library.