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.
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!