Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.
I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.
So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.
Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.
And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.
The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.
And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.
Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.
In this case, you should get a 3D printer.
Thanks, that’s a really cool hint!
I’ll try whether that works in the locked-up state
Yeah, heared that a lot.
But I didn’t specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn’t qualify for Win11.
So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.
But yes, I’ll buy AMD next time.
I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.
If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.
I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.
So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.
I can second Xfce. I’m using it on the chroot Linux I run on my phone. It doesn’t get much lower end than that, and Xfce performs perfectly.
And it feels much more polished than LXDE.
Happy to help!
Btw, check out Netguard (either the F-Droid version or the one from Github, since these two versions allow system-wide adblocking).
And Newpipe.
If you don’t know these apps yet, they will change how you use your Android device.
As long as it still boots, you can undo the change with a simple adb pm enable [packagename].
I wouldn’t recomment disableing system critical things like systemui. You can google each package together with “Can I disable X” and you should get decent infos.
Regarding the launcher:
I don’t have a Fire TV but I had a Fire Tablet. So if these two work the same, you can install another launcher without issues. But Amazon removed the setting for default launcher, so it will always pick the stock launcher when you press the home button.
To override that, there are two options.
It’s really great for my work as a software developer. I used it for more than 10 years for work.
My entertainment PC is not Win11 compatible, so I’m trying to switch to Linux with that one too, but it’s giving me a lot of grief.
This here is the solution for what you want: https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/
You can disable whatever app you want until the system doesn’t work any more. Just install an alternative for what you want to disable (e.g. the launcher) and then disable the Amazon version.
I wasn’t specifically talking about this product alone, but about the general trend. I don’t own any Amazon hardware.
A few years ago, piracy was all but dead because or really good offers like Netflix. All the stuff you wanted was there and the price was ok.
Now to get the same that you got for a tenner a month on Netflix, you have to pay for half a dozen of streaming services.
Youtube forces you to watch more ads than actual content. All services are increasing prices while decreasing what you are getting for that money. And all sorts of products are retroactively introducing ads.
I mean seriously, if someone bought that stick, they paid for it. They shouldn’t have to worry about updates actively making the device worse.
It’s an industry-wide trend that sucks, and it’s one that creates resistance. People start pirating, use adblock and some hack their devices. Not because it’s impossible to have a situation that suits everyone, but because they purpously use enshittification to suck more money out of their customers.
Yeah, that is what on demand is supposed to do. But when it freezes, the game already started and rendered the first few seconds on the dGPU. One time I managed to play for ~10 minutes before the freeze.
And it remains frozen. I once waited for ~1h and it didn’t recover.
Tried it with and without, same result. It starts on the GPU and the whole system freezes.
Do you use xorg or wayland?
Are you using a laptop that can switch the GPU or are you running Nvidia only? What GPU and driver version do you have?
I’m running Xorg, because I’ve read a lot about the Nvidia+Wayland troubles.
That’s why piracy is back on the menu.
Don’t start with the tinkering aspect first.
Ask yourself, why does your kid use Windows?
Probably to play games, access the internet and maybe do their homework. Most probably, they don’t use Windows because they specifically enjoy working with Windows, but because it easily lets them do whatever they actually want to do on a PC.
Spending 5h on fixing some weird incompatibility between the Nvidia GPU, your DE and Proton might be fun for some, but it’s most probably not what your kid wants to do when they could be gaming or doing whatever they actually want to do. Problems like that can scare them off quickly.
So first setup the PC so that everything they usually do on Windows works without issues.
The next question is, why would your kid want to run Linux instead of Windows?
The usual advantages (FOSS, free to use, better for developers) don’t really matter to most kids. The only things I can think of right now are:
With the setup completed and advantages thought of, you can let the kid use Linux quite similarly to Windows. When the kid wants new software or has an issue, work together with them to get everything running. First do everything and let them watch, later let them do more and more of the process.
That’s basically it.
Is that so different than in previous generations? Even back in the C64 era most kids just played games from disks they bought.
If you got into computers any time from the mid-90s, you would have been using Windows and that’s it.
Smartphones always came with their predetermined OS without a command line or programming tools on them. (There where apps for that on many systems, but in general, that wasn’t a thing most users used.)
From the 80s on, programming wasn’t required to use a PC and most users never learned it.
In general, people would just use pre-made software, because they use a PC/smartphone as a tool to do what they want to.
It’s kinda like with any other tools. People buy a hammer because they need to get a nail into a wall. Only very few people are interested in a hammer itself and get into the art of making their own tools.
Most people I helped getting Linux to work are actually not techy at all and they haven’t touched the CLI at all so far…
I guess it differs if you use Linux because you are interested in the technology or if you use it because Windows 11 doesn’t run on your PC.