Quazatron

I feel the same, I know that things will likely go downhill if he goes. That’s why I also buy GoG games, I want to be able to download them if things go sour with Steam.

smaller pool of desktop users

There, I fixed it for you.

This is about desktop Linux, so I was wrong to correct you. My bad.

Another vote for PiHole. It keeps your home network cleaner by ignoring the ads.

Terminator is my weapon of choice. Supports tabs, multiple terminals per tab, multiple terminal input and a lot of other neat stuff.

My Manjaro desktop already migrated.

I decided to install Plasma next to XFCE to see if I liked it. Then I thought I might as well try Wayland too.

Turns out the combo works great, even with games and Steam, so I’m quite happy with it.

Oh no, my desktop is fried!

1. Create a new user.
2. Login as new user.
3. Copy your old files over.
5. Profit.

I always treat the system as discardable and only backup the /home and /etc directories. Saving those, I can afford to wipe the system and re-settle on a new distro if I want to.

Of course if you throw Windows into the mix, all bets are off. Personally, I stay the hell away from that.

Mark it as an achievement on your learning path and move on. We all did something silly like that at some point.

Great that you have backups, get a fresh install and restore it.

Lessons learned: don’t work as root unless you absolutely positively have a good reason to do so.

You will find unhelpful people in any group of people. Linux community is not special in that regard.

Manjaro seems to be a word that gets you down voted pretty quickly.

I’ve been using it for years with few issues, but then I’m not using AUR.

I also use EndeavorOS, Xubuntu, Debian in other machines. One thing that annoys me about EndeavorOS is that using a graphical package manager is not recommended but I’ve grown to like using those.

Let me count the ways:

• Edited /etc/sudoers with vi instead of visudo.
• The classic rm -fr /
• The typical chown myuser: / -R
• Removed the bootloader dunno why
• Some shenanigans involving dd and the wrong device

I could go on, but my memory tends to erase the painful memories.

Don’t switch based on hype.

Put your chosen distro on a USB pen and boot from that. Try to do the activities you usually do, see if it works for you.

If you feel comfortable, make the switch. If you have any doubts, get a second disk and install Linux in it so you can have a fall back plan.

My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.

I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.

I just have to do a system update every year or so.

She’s now 87.

I recommend creating 3 partitions. One for UEFI, one for /boot and one for LVM.

Inside the LVM you can assign volumes with complete flexibility. You can expand and shrink volumes. You can leave space unallocated and allocate it when the need presents itself. You can combine multiple disks in a single volume. You can do RAID over LVM or the other way around.

Or you can go with ZFS or BTRFS, they have subvolumes and other nice features built in.

What you don’t have is to be stuck with fixed layout partitions anymore.

It blows my mind that we had multiple modern ways to setup volumes in Linux (LVM, ZFS, BTRFS) for decades, yet people keep using partitions like it’s 1990.

You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.

Patient gamers unite!

Also, who has time to waste waiting for a 90GB game to load and compile it’s shaders or whatever so you can enjoy the main character’s pimples in full anti aliased resolution when you can just double click some 20 year old game and be right in the thick of it in zero time? I play to have fun, I don’t need all this ultra realistic crap. Give me 5 minutes with some obscure indie game and I’m happy.

I’m old enough to have clustered some 16 desktop PCs using openMOSIX a long time ago, before the era of multiple cores and threads.

The whole cluster would function like a single Linux system, automatically spreading the work between nodes.

I used it to run SETI@Home for a bit of fun.

It was a neat idea, but never went mainstream. Soon single PCs were powerful enough to run virtual machines and be partitioned instead of clustered.

I don’t hate it, I know that it adds a lot of security to a system, it’s just that it’s not user friendly and it can sometimes leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell happened.

That’s pretty much it.