Can you give me a Linux smartphone?
I will promise to hate Google and appleGraphene OS is the closest you can get to this type of experience on a phone I think. Feels like having a cell phone 20 years ago before everything was tracked.
I got my family member to finally try Linux. They now don’t want Windows 11 back and said how it is easier the workflow is. All I did was show them how to update and install and uninstall using the store and a few basic terminal commands.
as a mint user, what basic terminal commands do they (and i guess i) need to know?
Linux fans: Teaching you all you need to know to survive in Russian politics.
Listen up Linux evangelists. Here is how you get users on Linux:
YOU DO NOT TELL THEM IT’S FUCKING LINUX.
Don’t talk about operating systems, M$ Winblows, open vs. closed source, security, privacy, STFU and deliver Linux.
I used to make “little old lady” laptops and PCs. “Oh! You know computers? Can you fix mine? I can’t afford much.”
Yes. And I’ll do it for free.
Take it apart, dust it out, throw in whatever spare parts ya got laying around, install an SSD, see if that old CPU will fit, new heatsink grease, Load Linux Lite, get all the drivers working, hook it to their WIFI, show them how to get email and browse.
Done. STFU about Linux. Nobody cares but nerds. They don’t know it isn’t Windows, and they don’t need to know.
Not one of those folks ever called me back to repair their machine.
for people who do not care about OSs, yes. but if they care about OSs, or you believe they actually want to know about it, you tell them
remember, nothing is black and white!
The type of person that cares will bring it up when you talk about what they use their computer for.
perhaps for that particular group… though i had a friend whose old af macbook air had stopped updating literally years ago, and he still used it because it still worked… but then apps slowly stopped working
i installed linux on it, and he was actually really keen to give linux itself a go, and it worked great for him!
i gave him an old macbook a little while after that, and he’s back on macos now, but he said he’d switch back in a heartbeat if there were problems (slowness, update compatibility, etc)
i guess the thing being he’s not really technical enough to care about the OS other than outcomes, but also was actually interested in linux itself to learn for the sake of it… he’s a lab tech, and vibe codes data manipulation tools, so not a lot of IT-related skills, but always interested in learning
This is the way. “I don’t want to learn another operating system!” - My mom, dealing with Windows 10 EOL. All she needs is LibreOffice set to look like Excel/Word, and FF.
Did she ever “learn” Windows?
I’ve been using Windows since 95 and I can’t find shit in Windows.
I think it’s because she’s retired and it’s more like “no more new friends.” She and I both started on Windows 3.1 (I did the Win 95 install), so the last time she was exposed to a Mac OS, it was System 7 on a Macintosh Performa in 1993. Maybe she just thinks she’s too locked in, I dunno.
This is what I do with my SOs mothers pc, she recently complained that the (15 yo) pc was slow to boot so I’m redoing it in the near future.
Me when my 13yo daughter shows me how she can draw on her ipad on her mint box because she found, downloaded, and stood up weylus all by herself.
Thank you ! I’ve been looking for something like this
The school computers are probably using ChromeOS, which is arguably worse.
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They all got issued some cheapo dell laptops, but abso windows ive seen them ha ha
Wonder if they are thin clients. I remember setting up some Dell thin and zero clients using Windows for a state college in Florida a few years back. 2019 I think. Everything being forced into OneDrive storage for their personal files, but it made it so they could sit down at any desk, and pull the computer up out of the desk and login and have their crap while it all being very locked down/managed.
Those honestly can be a pretty nice setup in situations where the classroom changes
Makes management simple and slightly more affordable when you need a lot of them. No graphics cards or good CPUs needed on the clients. They are just a remote display with inputs at that point. All the processing is happening on the servers. Instead of buying a $1200 dollar computer to last for 5 years, you buy zero clients for often less than $500 and when the operating system and applications get more demanding you don’t care on the clients, just the back end. Test environments are easier, swap outs are easier. From a management point of view it’s great. From the client user side though it gets limited when it comes to more demanding applications. Sure the graphics cards can perform the tasks needed for video editing, but uploading/downloading/editing videos that are stored on a cloud somewhere would just be a nightmare, so you’d need network storage locally, but even then it still isn’t going to be as useful as just performing it locally on a machine, and having a copy on an external you walk with.
Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.
I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.
I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.
Citrix does well in those situations. A standard virtual machine image set up for standard users and then seperate images for those that need other apps running off seperate hardware with dedicated GPUs. None of the data needs to pull to the device you are on, and no matter what machine you walk up to, even remotely at home you can access it without even needing a VPN but rather set it up using 2 factor on the login site where only single factor is needed when onsite. So no software is needed on any of the clients you log in from. And the “computer” you are signed into is located on the same network as where you use network drives so it works better than a VPN at accessing the data.
Someone hops on your machine when you went to lunch, hop on another and have it bring the same desktop you were using up, drive home, same desktop. If set up right it’s nice, if not… There is always struggles for people
I don’t think they are, she was able to bring it home and use it for homework
I’d much rather have to use windows than
shittier androidChromeOSChrome OS devices can be really nice since they don’t need x86
Debatable
I think the core issue is school
user is not in the sudoers file
Schools run Windows?
These days it is all Chrome OS
Back in my day my school used windows. Activated by the computers teacher from some bootleg cd, as god intended.
I am eastern european and haven’t seen a school computer running chrome os in my life.
To be fair, the computers here are older than chromeos
Our computers got updated in 2023…
Do you happen to go to the same school as some politician’s children ?
Somebody uses chromeos ?
Our schools here barely even use computers at all. Chrome OS just does not exist
Never seen one run chrome os. It was either Windows or lightweight linux like XFCE
In the US it is pretty common
I teach at a business college and a ton of my students buy Chromebooks because they’re cheap and just use cloud-based software. Windows is doomed as an OS because an entire generation has grown up never using it.
It is surprising Google hasn’t completely dominated. I’m interested to see what will happen as Chrome OS slowly becomes Android.
Not so surprising with windoze’s ever increasing system requirements.
Even the shittiest of laptops a school district would buy new support windows 11. It’s only 7+ year old machines.
I’ve never seen ChromeOS. I think it’s just not a thing in my country.
Might just be a US thing, it’s all I’ve seen in schools here (for daily use I mean, I did see a 3d modeling class using Windows desktops though)
Is your country under sanctions from the US?
Quite the opposite!
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip okay, I won’t be vague. I’m from Israel. Not hiding it, you can find out pretty easily from my comment history.
And in case you wondered, yes, I find the genocide in Gaza abhorrent and unacceptable. This is not the place to talk about this though so let’s leave it at that.
Interesting
Here in the US Chomebooks are very popular in school because they are cheap, durable and easy to lock down and manage.
I see it sold in shops. I never saw it actually being used though.
Mint is just so fucking great to get new users in, it’s also what I install on the machines of the poor souls who are still trapped in Microsoft’s hellscape and are open to the idea of trying another OS.
The Linux Mint devs are really doing awesome work.
I checked this threads replies because it was a Star Wars meme, but now that I’m here, is Mint good for gaming? I really do NOT want to “upgrade” to Windows 11 but it’s always been gaming that has kept me from going Linux.
Linux gaming is in a great place right now, thanks to proton framework developed by valve. Anything on steam will pretty much just work with no tweaks at all necessary, and if you need proprietary launchers for your games (blizz, epic, etc.) then lutris handles that.
The only games which won’t work well without some kind of mods are those with the anti cheat root kits…apex namely. Thankfully those are few and far between but you could get unlucky depending on what games you’re maining.
Bazzite is a distro you should consider because it’s made specifically for gaming and comes with some nice optimizations already baked in, but Mint will work fine if you really want something that looks and feels like windows. Either way, try out Linux, you won’t regret!
Second for Bazzite. Have it on my steamdeck.
If you have specific games you play on steam you can look them up on Protondb and see community data on how well they work.
Mint main here, and I’ll say outright: most distros are good for gaming. Got steam? Then you have an easy install of proton. Got flatpak? You got bottle to help you setup wine configs.
Mint is not setup out of the box for gaming (unlike distros like nobara), but it’s still arguably easier to install than windows’s exes.
I recommend mint to start getting into Linux. Keep it 4-5 months as daily driver, then you’ll be free to try other things. Personally I did some distro hopping, but came back to it as it was just… Good and stable.
… Until you talk about Nvidia. By default, mint uses the nouveau drivers… Which can be hit or miss. There’s the driver manager to help you one click install other versions, but you might have to try a few to get it working. If steam games crashes on startup, but not in Nvidia GPU only mode, that might be a bad version. That’s not really a mint thing, but it’s good to know.
For Mint and gaming specifically, somebody else would probably answer better but I can’t imagine it’s going to be too different from any other Linux distribution. If my memory serves me right, there are pretty easy to use utilities to install Nvidia proprietary drivers (which can often be the painpoint for people, though my experience has luckily been different). That being said, I do know a lot of people tend to advise Bazzite for gaming, so again, maybe someone more knowledgeable there could chime in.
For the more general question of gaming on Linux (irrelevant of the distribution), Steam has made things really easy for a lot of games. I have switched to Linux about 15 years ago and I can tell you it used to be a pita, but now with Proton, a lot of games “just work” TM. Unfortunately, some games do remain unplayable, in particular some multiplayer games which require kernel level anti cheats. You should check beforehand for the games you are interested in, but if something is truly unsupported that you want to play, Mint or no Mint, you’re shit out of luck.
My advice would be, if you have time for that, to back up your data (which you do anyways right?) and just give Mint a spin. You won’t brick your computer, worst case there is a showstopper and you can just reinstall windows. I am sure plenty of folks online would be happy to help in the process ;)
Mint’s installer makes it pretty easy to set it up for dual boot so you can keep windows on the machine to try things out.
No, and this place will heavily gaslight you. Yes most games do work now, it just takes a ton of extra configuration and constantly getting shit like controllers working well.
Genuinely curious what the ton of extra configuration and controller issues you’ve encountered are? Speaking only for myself, since Proton it’s been pretty much smooth sailing, even with an Nvidia GPU.
Granted I don’t have more “niche” interests like VR or flight/driving sims which would require pretty specific “controllers” and may just have been lucky all around.
Incorrect documentation, controller latency, having to write out configuration and scripts for pipewire to use my HDMI audio, same with HDMI displays and gnome, having to create new display modes so that games see and use them, missing vrr in many games, a wireless headset is missing the mic input, missing HDR in all games running in gamescope, and having to pull out and put back in my HDMI cord every time my display turns off.
Don’t get started about having to run a Debian container to run vscode because flatpack doesn’t work consistently.
Running a 3080, 12700k, and mostly standard hardware.
So you’re the person who got all my bugs so I could have none.
Jokes aside, the pipewire stuff in particular sounds painful, this is a rat’s nest I am very glad I have not had to touch.
Do you have TV’s or HDMI audio through passthrough? I’m utterly convinced 98% of the Linux community has no clue. I regularly run into these issues across distros and I’ve basically become convinced that nearly everyone is running just standard monitors and wired in controllers.
It has to be a sampling problem.
Yes I do on my laptop (have not tried on my desktop which is connected to a standard monitor) + using an Xbox and an 8bitdo controller through Bluetooth.
Never had issues with hdmi audio passthrough, (but did use to have weird resolution issues, circa Ubuntu 10.04, on a particular TV that I never could solve).
I am not trying to negate your experience, or trying to assess sample size btw. I am just genuinely just as baffled as you seem to be, from the other end, and would like to know of potential issues I am not even aware of.
Linux mint killed my parents.
My wife has been using Linux in home as far as we started living together (aprox. 15y). Recently she moved from working as a chef in restaurants to doing it for a company and they gave her a Mac to deal with her corporate business (email, meetings and so on) and she hates it, she said that everything looks cute, but nothing works like she wants and cannot change anything.
MacOS is a full Unix distribution and is an odd mishmash of an OS that used to care about power users and a weird iOS based facade. You can actually do quite a few of the things in macOS that you can do in Linux you just have to know where to look, some things have been hidden from the Applications folder but can still be found using Spotlight for instance. MacOS even still has a native X11 implementation for what it’s worth.
I would still prefer Linux but given the choice I will take macOS over Windows every time.
I miss when Apple was fun. It’s been a very long time. I dragged some more time out of it with Hackintoshing, but that’s done now.
Exactly this (except I prefer macOS over Linux out of habit). If you’re a power user that’s comfortable working from a terminal, macOS is really just a polished UNIX system. There are no guard rails that
sudo !!won’t get you past.
Obi Wan never told you what happened to Linux Mint.
The company I work for just announced that we are switching to Windows 11. I’m considering quitting.
I recently installed mint on my laptop and I’m stumped trying to get my bluetooth headphones and windows’ shared folders to work, I can see why most people don’t use linux
bluetooth can be a common frustration point, but the Windows shared folders should work. Do you mind me asking what you’ve tried so far?
I don’t really have a good memory, but I talked through it with some folks online and after 2 hours none of us could figure it out so I don’t think you’ll have much luck.
The error I kept getting was
mount error(13): Permission deniedwhen trying to runsudo mount.cifs '//DESKTOP-N84OKKP/My Music/ -o username='*******',password='*******'(username and password redacted, but there was a space in the username and an ! in the password for the computer sharing the folder)
Here’s what I tried:
- Setting the username/password to those of either computer
- Setting the UID (with
uid=$UID) - Changing the name of the shared folder
- Unsharing it and resharing it
- Putting different parts of the command in quotes
- Switching between left slashes and right slashes
- Trying both
sudo mount.cifsandsudo mount -t cifs - Various combinations of the above
- Changing the security protocol with
sec=(I don’t remember what to, I didn’t write this one down)
I know the shared folder itself works, because I can access it from a non-linux computer.
Dumb question here, but you did remember to point at a directory to mount the share to, right?
Part from that, I’ve encountered needing to provide the domain as well (typically WORKGROUP) as the credentials for a user with access to the given share. Furthermore providing username and password on the command-line is known to have some issues, thus I encourage you to provide them in a credential file, which would look something like this:
username=value password=value domain=WORKGROUPMy typical command, changed for your case, would be:
mkdir -p ~/mounted_music sudo mount -t cifs -o credentials=~/creds //DESKTOP-N840KKP/My\ Music ~/mounted_musicNot sure I’ve encountered it myself, but some shares doesn’t support Unix Extensions which can be disabled with “nounix”, you might want to define access rights then either “rw” or “dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777”. (0777 is not a good practice, but it’ll do for testing) thus something like the following options argument.
-o credentials=~/creds,rw,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,nounixDumb question here, but you did remember to point at a directory to mount the share to, right?
Yeah, I forgot to make that a part of the comment, oops!
I’ll try your other suggestions when I can.
Wholesome
