Okay, I'm doing it. I'm giving #Linux a fair shot for the first time in about a decade. You fediverse people convinced me.
Well, that went poorly. Just a bunch of blank screens and unresponsive flashing cursors, even after updating graphics drivers.
Oh well. Maybe I'll try again in 2034.
So, I figure, maybe it was just not the best distro. So, I try downloading a whole other one. It has its own program to download an image and write it to a USB stick. Great. I wait and that finishes and I try to boot it and... it fails disk validation.
People, this is why #Linux will never overtake Apple & Microsoft. I want to believe and I'm super tech oriented and I can't even install the damn thing.
@LouisIngenthron just flash like #LinuxMint or #PopOS. Install it onto a flash drive using Rufus.
the barrier to adoption here involves a bunch of conflicting or incomplete information that tends to mislead the uninitiated.
@scien LinuxMint was the first one I tried. Couldn't get it to run with hardware graphics, even after installing the mfr drivers through the linuxmint driver installer.
@LouisIngenthron drivers are indeed a bitch when they dont work automatically tho I will say.
if your computer is more on the old side you might want to look into MX Linux.
Or if it's something like Nvidia you might look into trying to get the latest Nouveau via Arch.
@scien Yeah, that was what scared me away from Linux all those years ago. I had heard it was better now, but apparently not better enough.
@scien Yeah, RTX 3080. Plenty of power, but nothing bleeding edge. Should be well within mainstream by this point.
@LouisIngenthron the problem is Nvidia is a lil bitch who has been a pain in the ass IRT linux driver support for a looooooooong time.
it's been systemic issues all the way down for a hell of a long time. only recently has this situation improved on linux so you may very well need something more modern.
afaik KDE has better support for some kind of syncing part too so you might want to try KDE Plasma via EndeavorOS.
@scien That's too bad... not having the support of one of the only two major hardware developers is a pretty big showstopping detraction for the platform.
@LouisIngenthron it's changing recently. we've even gotten some commits from contributers whose email is hosted at Nvidia.
Additionally Nouveau - an open source impl of Nvidia drivers - is really taking off.
if I had to guess why the change of heart, I'd say it's probably bc of the A.I. pivot Nvidia is doing. linux runs most the servers everywhere so it seems like a natural conclusion that they'll want it now that they're less consumer-orientated.
@LouisIngenthron Here's a very funny clip of Linus quite literally giving Nvidia the middle-finger about this problem especially:
@LouisIngenthron you using Nvidia or smth?
mint's default install can be uber ancient. afaik the Edge ISO option might fix something in that regard.