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.
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 you using Nvidia or smth?
mint's default install can be uber ancient. afaik the Edge ISO option might fix something in that regard.
@scien Yeah, RTX 3080. Plenty of power, but nothing bleeding edge. Should be well within mainstream by this point.
@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 Here's a very funny clip of Linus quite literally giving Nvidia the middle-finger about this problem especially:
@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.