Today I am moving not only myself, but my parents to Linux!
For me this is a long time coming. I discovered and started dabbling with Linux when I was 13 or so and somehow got an image of Backtrack 5 running on a Macbook Pro without virtualization (I’m still not entirely certain how I managed it) as I was always interested in IT/Security.
Eventually I went to school for IT and I’ve been working in tangents of the industry ever since, though few of my workplaces have made use of Linux unfortunately.
I have been running Debian on my personal laptop for a couple years now and I have had very few problems outside of breaking my sources.list the other day when I echo’d into it with instead of >.
I have a friend who recently fully switched over to Arch as well, and now more than ever I have found that all my friends, including those who are non-technical, are interested in learning about or moving to Linux, so I have decided now would be a good time to be an example for them.
I have made my parents aware of the ongoing and worsening problems with Windows and that their version of the OS will be out of support soon and today I’ll be putting them on Mint. I don’t expect any problems as I already had them using Open Office and other such applications since they didn’t want to buy licensing for MS Office years ago. Furthermore their computer has no special hardware/software otherwise, it’s basically just a Micro-ITX email machine that they sometimes use for printing.
I have enjoyed using Debian on my laptop so I intend to install Debian 12 to my desktop system, though I expect some complications as it has some hardware I have not had to configure on Linux before. Specifically It has an NVIDIA EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA and an NZXT Kraken Liquid CPU cooler.
I am aware that Debian has full documentation on how to go about installing and setting up the drivers for an RTX card, but if anyone has done this, I would certainly appreciate any anecdotal advice regarding the matter as well as anything I might want to know about making sure the cooler is functioning.
If anyone wants to offer advice but needs to know more about the hardware, I have the following specifically:
- PSU - Cooler Master V750 Gold V2, 750 Watt, White
- Motherboard - ATX ASUS PRIME z390-A
- Case - White NZXT H510 Elite for ATX form factor, Tempered Glass, Integrated RGB lighting
- CPU Cooling - NZXT Kraken X53 240mm AIO RGB CPU Liquid cooler, Rotating infinity mirror design, improved pump
- GPU - EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA
- RAM - Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4, White
- Storage - Two 2 TB Seagate Firecuda M.2 NVME’s
- Peripherals include a focusrite Scarlett audio interface, Wired Logitech mouse and keyboard, Logitech C920 HD Pro Camera
Thanks for any advice, and I just wanted to offer a thanks to this community at large as I have read and learned some very neat things since I joined Lemmy.
EDIT:
I have successfully installed Mint for the parents! It went off mostly without a hitch. I found that Brother provides Linux drivers/utility scripts for their printers on a per-model basis so I was glad to see they really were at my side haha. Unfortunately, while the printer is detected and prints, even after installing the scanner driver for the model, I can’t seem to get the device to be detected as a scanner in either the simple scan utility or in xsane, so I will be troubleshooting that in the coming days. Otherwise I am very pleased with it.
EDIT 2:
I return to you all from my fresh Debian system!
The system, applications, and most configs have all been set now, it is mainly my files remaining for transfer.
So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done. After adding the repo’s the Nvidia drivers installed like a dream. As I have 3 displays there was a little bit of fun in setting the proper display configuration for pre-login positioning, but those fixes were really quite straightforward.
It is about 5 AM so I am going to bed and continue onward into a brighter future tomorrow, but I wanted to thank you all again and provide the somewhat obligatory neofetch screenshot before I left.
https://files.catbox.moe/v8j8we.png
EDIT 3:
A final edit to this, but the parents like Mint so much that they also had me install it to their laptop haha.
So glad to see that the state of Linux as a technology is now such that people in their very late 60’s who are almost entirely non-technical can not only use a Linux system as a daily driver on more than one computer, but enjoy using it :)
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OpenOffice
Most Linux distros come with LibreOffice pre-installed. That’s what you want. OpenOffice pretty much stopped being developed in 2010 and the developers moved over to LibreOffice.
Good to know, I’m certain they wouldn’t have a problem as they learned open office easily enough. Can confirm Mint comes with Libre Office installed as well as Thunderbird which they also currently use as their email client. Thank you!
Oh, so LibreOffice is actually a fork of OpenOffice, meaning back in 2010, the devs copied the code from OpenOffice and have been developing it further from there. So, it’s like your parents just got upgraded to the newest edition of the office suite they were using. A lot of it should still be familiar to them.
Basically, the devs had to change the name for legal/political reasons. In all other ways, LibreOffice is the continuation of OpenOffice.
Beautiful, I did not realize it was a fork, this is even better news!
My workstation runs Ubuntu 22.04 with an AMD GPU, but I use an NVIDIA GPU (A4000 which is basically a 3070) for VFIO virtual machines, mostly windows. I did try Debian 12 vm with VFIO and had zero issues getting the Nvidia card set up. My VMs have secure boot /TPM enabled so no problems there either. I don’t remember the steps I took but basically disable secure boot in bios, install the proprietary driver, update the kernel, reenable secure boot. Debian was the easiest Linux distribution I tried to get set up. I also tried Ubuntu 23.10 and that worked ok. I think Fedora was OK but cannot remember. Bazzite surprisingly was a fail.
Also when all else fails, check the arch wiki. Obviously not tuned to Debian but generally most things you can figure out and the documentation is top notch.
Also wanted to mention if you’re not striping those Firecudas, definitely assign one of them to your home directory. If you do stripe, I’d create a 3.5TB home directory and leave 500 GB for / and your swap file.
Good luck.
ETA: in my experience, drivers either work right away or not at all so good news is that if your setup fails, it should fail fast, unlike windows that tries to find a workaround for janky configurations.
This is top tier information, thank you very much :)
Very glad to hear that at least one person out there had a good experience in doing what I will be trying to do.
I am not currently striping the storage, but traditionally I have used one as the drive for the entire OS and then the secondary one is for extended file storage for things I frequently access which require a large amount of storage (I have a game called STALKER Gamma installed which is essentially a collection of mods so it is hundreds of GB, I have enormous files for 3D work such as textures etc, and a great deal of music/video files).
I am especially appreciative you brought this up though as I had not considered changing the configuration. To me, striping sounds like it might be the way to go based on how I tend to use the storage, but this might be because I am unaware of the benefits of having a full disk dedicated to /home.
Can you expand on why that may be preferable as I would be super interested to hear about the potential benefits!
Thanks
If you need to reinstall your OS you don’t have to mess with the home drive. I use Linux for work and some of my clients actually require all data to be stored on a separate disk or partition from the applications. It also makes your backup strategy simpler and is transparent to you as a user.
2TB is too much space for an OS disk, especially since you’re not going to dual boot, so might as well get a bigger data directory and speed.
My workstation is a PCIE Gen 4 Threadripper. I’ve got a multifunction card with a couple 2TB Gen 3 NVMe drives that I striped and the bandwidth is identical to a single Gen4 4TB NVMe. Obviously you’d need a backup strategy to handle the case of a drive failing but that is true no matter what.
Thank you, this is very informative.
Thankfully I have ~15 TB of external storage so backing up the totality of the internal storage shouldn’t be an enormous problem.
Wishing you luck. Linux is fun AF.
Thank you and I agree, the power on the command line is something I miss every day I use windows so I believe I will be much happier after the switch!
I’ve been living on Tumbleweed KDE for about a year now, and I love it. My mum recently got a new laptop, so I decided to make it a dual boot of Windows 11 LTSC (no Copilot or forced MS accounts) and Fedora KDE.
Apparently Windows doesn’t ship with the relevant network driver built-in, so that was fun to hunt down while Device Manager didn’t announce what network card was in there. The manufacturer’s site lists a certain driver as the “latest”, and that would “successfully” install without actually doing anything. Half an hour later, it turns out that pressing “more” on their website shows previous versions of the driver… and drivers for a totally different network card that also gets shipped with this laptop sometimes. Naturally, the hidden one worked first try. Most other drivers were borked too, so Windows Update had to fetch them.
I then got to set up Fedora, which I chose because from what I heard it’s neither boring nor too bleeding edge, without Canonical’s controversial Snap shenanigans and with some relatively easy enabling of proprietary codecs (which I still need to verify) and with okay package management through Discover. The network card and everything else worked perfectly out of the box, but I have never installed Fedora before and forgot to partition the drive in Windows beforehand. Eventually I finish the install, install some apps and do some updates (while feeling uncomfortable with having to guess how package management works in dnf). I’m finally done, shut the laptop, bring it down to show her, open the lid, screen comes on…
… and then it shuts off. Turns back on, flickers a couple times, then permanently shuts off. Turns out there’s a kernel bug around display power saving that’s causing this, and I don’t know when the fix will land on Fedora.
It’s been real fun trying to explain to her that I didn’t just break her fancy new laptop every 15 minutes and that everything I did was just a conventional procedure that should be supported (I’m lying)
Best of luck to you in resolving!
My move for my parents to Mint went very well thankfully. Brother even supplies Linux drivers for their printers as a I found out and printing works great, but even after installing their scanner driver for the model, I can’t seem to get any scanning softwares to detect it so I’ll have to look into that part further.
Otherwise everything else runs super smooth. Now I have to deal with my system!
Little update in case you were wondering. After the news of kernel 6.13 being out I decided to look up when that would be available on Fedora. I found some mentions of the display bug being resolved in 6.12.9, and it’s true! Now my saga of switching a parent to Linux can truly begin!
Did you ever end up getting that Brother scanner to work?
No, haven’t had time to trouble shoot much unfortunately. If they need a scan they just use their phones at the moment which works fine, but I still have to investigate further.
For Brother Laser printers, I highly recommend the brlaser package over using the Brother-provided drivers.
Welcome to full time Linux!
So it looks like the brother driver utility installed both brlaser and brscan3, however it still wont detect unfortunately. Thanks for the welcome though!
you have a super modern pc, i’d recommend you use endeavour is so easy you just need to learn yay and pacman but honestly it is super easy
Thank You, I will take that under consideration :)
