A Linux noob (*) live-toots their Linux PC setup experience!

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

A Linux noob (*) live-toots their Linux PC setup experience!

(*) I have used Linux as my primary OS in... the previous millennium. It was 1998-2000 I think, and was Debian 2.x, on a 486 with 4MB RAM and 80MB hard drive. But I have used Windows since 2001, and also Mac since 2006.

So! Let's try Fedora now, and see what has changed in all these years.

[jon_valdes@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aras OK everyone, we're accepting bets on how long it'll take until Aras has both wifi and sound working!

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@jon_valdes @aras I'm betting he'll have them both working immediately, but the lights in his bedroom will suddenly only change their on/off state if the water is running in the bathroom sink

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aras good luck!

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Okay: Fedora site as a downloadable ISO and utility to write this into a USB stick. Then you can boot into actually working Fedora from that, that also functions as an installer. I like! I picked the KDE flavor of Fedora by the way. 1/

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Uhh: From the booted USB, I start the installer. Since my Windows partition takes up all the disk space, it seems to only suggest to format it? I was expecting some sort of “ an we shrink your windows partition” option. 2/

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aras ooo hard mode

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Uhh: However! The same live OS I just booted into has a KDE Partition Manager app, so I’m going to use that to resize the windows partition.

That… just took four hours with no progress bar. Disk (fast SSD) was chugging at 20MB/s while resizing 2TB partition down to 1.2TB.

It worked! But four hours with no progress indicator. Not nice. 3/

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Nice: the rest of actual install was really fast, several minutes perhaps. Booting into actual installed OS just works, internet (wired) just works. I did not check audio yet lol :) 4/

[jon_valdes@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @aras ah, you're clearly a seasoned Linux veteran. I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to leave this casino.

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Very nice: the "search" that happens when you press Start button equivalent (or windows key) feels nicer than on Windows! I did not know how "terminal" is called (turns out: "Konsole"), but typing either "terminal" or "command" or "console" all work and show it as a result.

Windows search most of the time works if you type things exactly, but *sometimes* even when you type app name exactly it goes "nope, never heard of it, want to search the internet?" 5/

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Nice: Installing apps via "download" route: 1password works, sourcegit (feels like closest alternative to @fork_dev on Linux - https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit) works. So far so good! 6/

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Shit: putting computer (this is PC, not a laptop) to sleep then does not wake it up. Had to reboot. After reboot, a dialog pops up asking if I want to report a problem; speaks of "noveau" which I assume is (nvidia) GPU driver something something. Did not test yet if this was one-off or would happen on every sleep; that would suck. Bug report experience next! 7/

[zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aras Nouveau is a reverse engineered community written NV driver that you should replace with the proprietary NV driver at your first opportunity yeah. I'm surprised Fedora installer doesn't do that by default.

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Confusing: initial bug report dialog nice, I can see various info. Then it asks me for bugzilla API key (?). Then starts some KDE Wallter Service, which then says "error", and also then error about "DBus Secret Service". Hey maybe no need to call secret service just yet, mkay?

I don't think anyone who's not a coder would get past all that. I'm not sure I did, TBH. 8/

[aras@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Nice: taking screenshots is same shortcut as on Windows (Win-Shift-S, drag to select region). Nicer magnifier than on Windows. 9/

[dotstdy@mastodon.social]

@zeux @aras fedora only ships non-proprietary stuff out of the box, you need to faff around to get it to work. (and yes, you should not use noveau at all, it's really broken and not really maintained or developed)

edit: actually iirc there's a tiny checkbox in the installer for "third party repos" which you can enable, to at least be able to install the real drivers once you get the machine running. but that's one of those very poorly signposted things you only notice after it's too late.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@dotstdy @zeux @aras also IIRC there's issue with Wayland in the proprietary drivers, unless something changed recently?

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@jon_valdes @aras awww XD

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aras as a long time fedora user, my interpretation of the bugzilla API key thing is they don't actually want bug reports