Picture of my daily driver machine installing openSUSE.
Wiiiiiiiiide progress bar
Main con of the ultrawide screens: everything installs/downloads slower
Just tilt the monitor clockwise. Gravity will help.
But the main benefit is that you can see the install/download progress in more detail.
It was also showing the same bar on all 3-monitors! I wanted my neighbors to know just how hard I was installing Linux!
Great choice of distro!
Troublefree for almost 2 years now on Tumbleweed.
Same here, the only time I had a problem was the Nvidia driver updating and breaking the compatibility.
It was Nvidia, it is always Nvidia…
As Torvalds said,
FUCK NVIDIA! (Well, he did not explicitly say that; but he gave nvidia the middle finger)
I think that counts as Universal Sign Language.
If you’re still on the fence about switching to Linux, try downloading a Live Linux USB image and booting it from a USB stick. This lets you try out Linux without changing anything on your Windows drive. The Live version will also let you see if Linux detects all your computer’s hardware before you install it for real.
I recommend Linux Mint for beginners.
IIRC you can even install stuff and more to try out software.
I agree on trying the live boot first. I played around with the live boot for a week, and ended up installing mint as dual boot when I got frustrated about not being able to save files, save settings etc. I was barely using Windows at that point.
Agree, a USB stick live install is a good way to test - users should just bear in mind it is slower than a real install as USB drives are not as fast as internal hard drives. Once the OS is loaded fully it will feel reasonably snappy but still every piece of software you launch will take longer to load than a real install, and the bigger the software the longer it will take to load.
I also tended to recommend Linux Mint for beginners although I think I’m moving more towards recommending OpenSuSE Leap. The reason being it ships with KDE which is a slick interface with a Windows like set up by default (although very customisable - users can create MacOS or Gnome like interfaces with relative ease if they prefer) and gives a better idea of what modern Linux is capable of than Cinnamon in my opinion. Also KDE’s Discover app makes it easy to install software, comparable to Mint’s software store. Mint still has many more guides online but they’re often around terminal use and APT based solutions, and I’m beginning to think that is actually a bad thing. Most stuff for mainstream users can be done via the GUI, and KDE offer’s a great GUI. Plus Flatpak is a far better way of installing custom software than the APT recommendations I still see widely shared, so I think it’s actually better to move people away from Mint. Personally I think OpenSuSE Leap is the better option (and possible Fedora KDE Plasma edition although I am less familiar with it).
I had already done that before pulling the trigger. I used Obsidian to get a listing of distros and then took notes as I tested them on my Lenovo Yoga 720 laptop. Obviously, not the same as my daily gaming rig, but it gave me a good enough approximation for how well I’d like some of the distros I tried. In the end it was Mint Cinnamon (currently installed on my Yoga) or openSUSE. I eventually had to reinstall openSUSE last night when KDE started giving me trouble. It’s probably the last time I try KDE for a while. I just don’t seem to have good luck with it all three times I’ve tried it across different distros.
Either way GNOME is working great this morning and I’m working on getting stuff customized!!
Welcome to the club! I installed Open Sousa Tumbleweed this summer.
(It’s similar to OpenSUSE, but has a marching band theme by default. This is totally a real thing, and it wasn’t just a speech to text failure.)
Can you link it? I can’t seem to find a page for it.
Welcome to the light side. I’m a happy Tumbleweed user for many years now. Love that Hitchhiker’s guide reference .
Hint: It’s 42
Don’t forget and bring the towel.
I wasn’t sure if that reference would fit here so I’m glad you enjoyed it! I am diggin’ the experience so far. Haven’t gamed on it, yet, but after reinstalling for GNOME, it’s been smooth sailing!
One of us, one of us!
Good luck :)
c/usernamechecksout /s
Even regedit hates windows regedit…
Funny enough I just changed my daily driver to Linux as well. Long time Linux power user, stuck with a Windows main. Finally made the transition, couldn’t be happier.
Congrats
What distro did you go with?
Good on you! And good luck!
Great to see another person moving to Linux and OpenSuSE. My only caution if this is your first time with Linux is that a point release like OpenSuSE Leap is probably a better place to start than Tumbleweed. I’m on Tumbleweed and it’s generally good but I have had a few things break over the last couple of years, often fixed at next update in fairness but it is frustrating even as an experienced user. I have also had to reinstall Tumbleweed on one occasion; it wasn’t a big deal as I’d set up a separate Home and System partition. Tumbleweed is great but it is a rolling release and even though it’s a well tested one rolling releases are always riskier in terms of things breaking.
I appreciate the cautionary tale. I already had to reinstall. I gave KDE another shot thinking previous issues were from the old Lenovo Yoga or distro I used it with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t so. Even though I intentionally took my time customizing the layout, somehow I had some KDE thing crash twice, the main display had shifted to only showing have the page, like it was stuck under the monitor, and after a reboot to fix that problem it had made it so the context menu on the main desktop was not showing all the options.
While I’m not a fan of GNOME, per say, as I am not a fan of Apple style docks for a taskbar, I never had issues with it, so I am using that instead of KDE.
I’ve had things break on both. So I gave up and changed to Kubuntu.
Congrats!
OpenSuse is a left field choice. Nothing wrong with it - just not a typical first distro. Hope you have a great time with it! I recommend using it for a solid month then working on a windows pc for a day - you’ll be blown away by how asinine windows is once you’ve got used to Linux.
You said it. I used openSUSE on my Lenovo Yoga 720 for a bit. That’s now running Mint Cinnamon and I’m digging’ it.
you’ll be blown away by how asinine windows is once you’ve got used to Linux.
This, absolutely. I really hate Linux sometimes. But then I have to deal with Windows, which I hate even more. It’s not that I like Linux. It’s that I like it more than Windows.
