Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now's your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.
I don't know if this is specifically possible. I'm not quite rookie-level new (been using it about a year now) but I have something I would love to have convenience-wise.
It's a desktop machine with regular speakers, and I have a wireless headset that connects to its own dongle (not Bluetooth). It's there a way to switch to the headset automatically when I power it on, and revert to speakers when I turn it off?
I feel like it's possible hardware-wise, but I'm not tryna learn how to code to make it happen, and I don't know how to find a software solution. I don't even know what to call what I'm looking for.
i'd suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).
depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple "pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>", or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.
note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.
Is the dongle visible by the system only when the headset is powered on? Does the computer have any way of knowing you've turned your headset on? What make and model is that headset?
I'm on Linux mint 22 and my audio outputs don't change automatically. When I plug in USB headphones, audio won't output to them unless I manually change it in settings.
Also, why can't I interact with the panel applets (on the right side) while I'm in game? For example: I'm playing a game, I plug in my headphones, I have to manually change the audio output so I hit the "windows" key to bring up the panel, but I can't interact with any of the applets on the right side of the panel (I can't select the audio icon and change settings from there). I have to search audio settings in the panel then alt tab to it. It's really cumbersome
Alright, absolute noob here, I'm not particularly interested in computer science or an OS I have to obsessively research. First, how is gaming on Linux nowadays? I play a lot of games, most of which are not triple-A, so I wonder how accessible this is. Second, what distributions are accessible and still customizable? I have all kinds of peripherals I'd like to be able to use, speaker systems, midi controllers, etc.
About gaming, from my personal experience, it's overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.
As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it's still in beta.
Fellow Linux noob, just started using it earlier this year so if someone with more experience wants to weigh in, please do.
That said, gaming on Linux is pretty good. Steam's proton makes most games playable out of the box, although it's still a good idea to check Proton DB to see if any particular game you want to play is playable.
As for your other question, I'm not totally sure what you mean by accessible and customizable, but I don't think any of your peripherals are going to be distro locked. The Arch Wiki is a pretty good resource for, well, everything, but most relevant to you for your peripherals (it also usually gives good information for any distro, not just arch)
Q1: Pretty good! Use ProtonDB to check what games work, and if you need to apply any fixes.
Q2: Linux Mint is the most popular choice for beginners, and it's extremely easy to use. Other people choose Pop!_OS because it's apparently better for gaming (I haven't tried it). However, I think the best distro for gaming, while still being extremely stable, is Nobara (a distro based on Fedora Linux).
Also, practically all Linux distros are customizable, don't worry about which one's the best.
P.S: You can browse through the most popular distros here: DistroWatch
(Background: I've been obsessively using Linux for four years.)
Is it that much better to have a Desktoo Environment, on my desktop computer? I'm still halving it with Windows trying to get my games to run on arch lol
I don't understand. Doesn't every GUI OS have a desktop environment? Not just Linux distros. Like, isn't the Windows Shell just Windows's desktop environment?
I tried running i3, using the arch wiki for the nvidia package. It suggested just the 'nvidia' package for a 2080 TI. Launched steam with proton (forget the newest version at the time it was like last month). Nothing would happen when launching any game. Probably doing a lot wrong or something, sorry if this isn't enough info. I did no logging.
I have an old (2017) Windows 10 box that is ineligible for Windows 11. Originally purchased to run my Oculus Rift, it now just streams YouTube and Twitch and plays some old Steam games and occasionally school related stuff (Lexia, Scratch, stuff like that).
I started thinking that, rather than worrying about an unsupported Windows OS on my network, I might upgrade to Mint or Ubuntu.
So, my question(s) is/are, how much of a hassle will such an upgrade be? Will I need to wipe the drive, or can I keep my files without having to back them up first? Can I run Windows games on Steam with Wine? Are there good 3D card drivers nowadays?
I'm reasonably versed in using Linux as a user, less so as an admin, in case that affects the way you answer.
That was half the reason I upgraded. I don't know if my old box would've been compatible (probably was), but I wanted it off Microsoft territory so bad and heating about Copilot sent shivers all over my spine.
I've never heard of installing any new OS without having to back stuff up. That's just wishful lazy thinking lol.
You probably won't have to do anything manually about Wine. Steam has Proton built in and it works great. As others always mention, check ProtonDB.com for user reports on how a specific game will work out.
I haven't run into any problems in my library, but I honestly haven't installed a ton of games.
I've used Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris for some other launchers (like Battle.net or Epic Games), and those have been a little hit or miss, but I think the main problem is something I'm missing. Not a huge priority but I'm still working on it occasionally.
I haven't heard anyone call or 3D card since the 90s. They're video cards or GPUs these days man. AMD has open source drivers that work just fine with Linux and should work just the same as the Windows version I believe.
Nvidia has open source ones, but they seem to be pretty terrible compared to the closed source ones. I had one issue with them last week but I think that was more related to KDE than it was the drivers' fault.
I don't really have any fancy hardware to describe how easy that was to get to work. Just a mouse, kb, headset(with mic) all of which worked fine without doing anything. I have a physical dongle for the controller, so I had to get a driver for that so I didn't have to use a Bluetooth connection (pretty shitty comparatively speaking) or gasp plug it in. Had a few issues with it for a while, there was an updated version under a new name and such but it all works now. Just turn the controller on and it's working instantly (unless I forget to charge it lol).
There would be no hassle in wiping the drive, you can do it as part of the super easy installation process for any Linux distro. Ideally you would back up any important files and drop them into your fancy new file system once the install is finished. And you can pretty much launch almost any game directly out of steam and it will run. There are a few exceptions for some of those games with anti cheats that rootkit your system, but the majority just work out of the box. Drivers included, but Nvidia might be ever so slightly annoying
Games work fine, if you install linux as a dual boot, you can move the files over (windows files appear as if the windows install was a usb key). Also drivers are fine
Depends on how much crap you're willing to put up with. It'll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)
I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.
Have you heard of Valve's Steam Deck? It's a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don't work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won't accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!
If you have AMD, you don't even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn't mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won't need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).
If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It's easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.
Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.
I'd be interested to see what people have to say regarding VR setup, but the Oculus gets little use anymore. I have a few games that were never ported to the newer, self-contained systems (I have a Quest 3), and we've downloaded a bunch of custom Beat Saber levels that I might feel bad about, but the sensors are a big enough pain to set up that I don't know that I'd feel that bad.
To install at minimum you'll need to likely shrink existing partitions and create new ones for linux if you don't want to wipe the drive, that would be a dual-boot setup with Windows still installed along side. Or you can just wipe the drive entirely and have only Linux.
Regarding the files you should already have backups of anything important, if you don't, set it up ASAP.
Messing with partitions can easily cause data loss if something goes wrong.
You also never know when hardware failure, malware, power surges, lightning strikes, or whatever other disaster will happen and cause data loss. 1 copy of files might as well be 0 copies.
I'm pretty sure anything of value is already backed up to my NAS. I'm just paranoid that my kids might freak out that I destroyed their state fair winning Scratch project or something.
What is something Linux related that you've learned recently?
As a meta question, could this work as an additional (or alternate) recurring discussion question? It felt similar in intent, to encourage people to keep learning / asking questions and chances are that if someone learned something then others will benefit from the information (or correct them)
After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal "immutable" distro install last week.
My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo "student-rugged" class laptop. Everything works and he hasn't had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.
The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.
I learned how a kernel actually loads a program and switches between them by using timer interrupts and interrupt vectors that point to specific locations in memory to resume execution from. Not specifically Linux related, but I'm trying to learn more computer science, and it just clicked for me two weeks ago. I've been programming microcontrollers for ten years, but those are monolithic programs, and while I knew what interrupts were and have used them, I never understood how an OS actually runs multiple things while staying in control. Now I do. About time I understood a core concept of these machines that have been here all 42 years of my life.
It's one of those "aha!" moments like when I realized classes and structs are just data types like any other in C++ when I was starting off programming and can be used like them. OOP became fun after that.
I remember when the mapping of virtual memory segments clicked for me. I think i said out loud, "that's so clever!". Now it just seems so fundamental to managing memory for user space applications, but I hadn't thought about how it was done before.
Is plasma big screen really an option? Id like to install it on a desktop to act as a android tv. Launch Stremio, YT and maybe one or two other apps/websites. Easy big tile navigation with remote (flirc).
It's in dev since 2020. The images hosted on the site are bit for any of my hardware. It says theres a Debian package. Installed that though LMDE but it was horrible. Somone mentioned Kububtu can install it with apt, but its not listed. Think I'll give up.
Howdy. I have a "homeserver" that I'd like to actually start using. What's currently keeping me from it are... Permissions.
I have TrueNas Scale running on top of Proxmox, and I can't for the life of me not access NFS Shares from other VMs (specifically a Debian VM that I use as Docker Host) that I host in Proxmox. Plox hlp.
I have a server that has multiple services running under multiple users that each store data. I want to be able to bundle all this data up and send it to another server for backups.
At a high level, how do I manage permissions for this? Currently I run the backup as root, then chown it to a special backups user which can log in through ssh. But this all feels clunky to me.
There are many ways to do this, but the next up from users is using groups!
For each file or data directory, create a group that owns it. This group should have the service's user as member. Then create a user for running the backups, and add it to all these groups.
The benefit of this is you don't have to use root, and you have an association of directory to group that you can always change. You can for example grant a user access to a data directory by just adding it to its group.