Installing OS, 10 years ago:
Windows: click a couple of buttons enter username and password
Linux: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github
Installing OS today:
Linux: click a couple of buttons, enter username and password
Windows: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github.
Link to video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qKRmYW1D0S0
I just tried to install Ubuntu on an old MacBook and after booting neither the keyboard nor trackpad work. CMD +R reset the whole thing to a working Mac so I’m still not sold
You tried to install a non apple approved software(being the entire OS) on a Mac system. Imagine how hard it is for linux developers to support this blackbox hardware configuration?
Try using something actually easier to program/use for running linux type OSes. I usually will suggest AMD.
If you need a strong graphics card on a laptop, I think those frameworks will be more than capable of offering that kind of flexibility. The potential of packing it up so that if you feel like the power-hungry gpu will take too much battery, then it can be flexible in allowing you to remove the gpu without thinking about a screwdriver
If you need ARM, then you should be mindful of the fact that the arm ecosystem is still quite new for pc users. There are not many software choices, but it does show some promise.
If you think you need Mac hardware, then you don’t need to go around throwing linux on it. MacOS is already Unix like. You are going to live with the fact that no one outside of apple will have proper hardware support at the OS level. Let alone driver support.
Heard and understood. I just wanted to mess around with a laptop collecting dust and Linux is all the rage these days. Don’t particularly need it for any purpose, just tinkering
Well, it seemed from your comment that you just expected this to work without tinkering. However, now you admit to be tinkering? This is a rather confusing story. When I’m tinkering, I’m exploring and expecting to run into edge cases or unsupported environments. Linux may be great, but it’s just a kernel with GNU on top to help build the larger OS. I believe the attitude towards linux is a bit misguided. It is a great tool, and its strengths mainly lie in the freedom of usage that allows for both fine-tune control and automatibility. I say windows and MacOS are strictly non automatable environments unless you venture into the developer side, and that will undoubtedly bring some with it some problems. As such, many systems that require the user to be more hands off and operate with high uptime will use Linux kernels. Being able to automate the process with minimal user input is essential in the performance and reliability of critical systems demand.
Again, I did not wish to be condemning your actions and rather alert you to the differing problems these tools are made to solve. MacOs and thereby its hardware was geared towards being an apple only product that is only properly supported by apple, and the problem it solves is to be a tool for rich and self-conscious individuals.
Windows was created to be a home and enterprise OS that can be used in almost any system that is quite an outstanding feat, but it really is because of the number of developers and users offer the ability for things to work. Mind you that even Windows was not made to be extremely automatable. yet there are tools being created to offer automating tasks, but many are closed source and tied to requiring funding. I even ran into some odd issues every once in a while.
Linux was expressly made to be a minimal system that offered high uptime and high automatibility that was free for everyone to contribute or use. This allows users and admins to set up their systems to be more hands-off when it came to tasks that were extremely time-consuming or continually have to be worked on without deadline while keeping costs low. It is just recently that Linux-based distributions are able to make use of features and packages that are geared to users who need to make manual tasks. Wayland is finally being more stable, driver support from large manufacturers, and even emulation of Windows APIs with use of proton/wine is getting better. Thus offering users the ability to do manual tasks and mix custom made automated scripts/tools into their environments.
Many see the hype and equate it to being able to use Linux systems like they did with the very much well funded manual systems that Windows and MacOS offered. Instead, Linux is just a tool and can be useful when it is needed.
I have a PC that I use for work and a couple old Mac laptops sitting around so I’d like to fool around with Linux, found a hundred articles on how easy it is but every time I try I literally can’t make the machine do anything. Maybe I just need a cheap usb keyboard
Apple, like Nvidia, are a hostile hardware platform. I have a lot of respect for the ingenuity of the people who invest time and energy to unlock closed hardware. That is the true foundation of the free software movement. I am far less sympathetic to people who support these vendors financially and then complain when things don’t work. Caveat emptor.
Yeah well I’m not sold on mac hardware, all bets are off as that is designed to be as FU to anything but Apple software. I’d say screw apple but they even managed to fubar screws just to be as consumer unfriendly as possible.
Any time I had to install on my old MacBook pros, I had to refit or refind every install, kajigger all the whatzits, then pray that it would all work. And then be pissed off because I couldn’t access my journalled partition.
In a nutshell, fuck apple for their hardware lockdown.
Lemme guess: You have a Mac with T2 chip. You need prebuilt ISOs for those Mac models. https://wiki.t2linux.org/
A 2019 with an i5 and a 2012 with an i7. Admittedly I haven’t tinkered much with either but the keyboard and trackpad being completely unresponsive wasn’t a great first foray
The first one has T2. Input devices not working is a known issue, that’s why you need custom ISOs. How was your luck with the 2nd one? Older Macs usually run much better with Linux but WiFi and bootloader installation (efibootmgr specifically) may be janky.
Idk, installing Linux was pretty easy 10 years ago too. Can’t comment about anything earlier than that though.
Even 20 years ago Linux was easier to install then Windows.
Last time I recall Linux being tricky was like late 90s.
Yeah, all my Linux installs after about 2003 were liveCDs. I used to carry my Gentoo CD around as my diagnostic tools for a while helping people fix their windows machines (or just backing up everything off it before reformatting).
I think Knoppix was the first live CD I used. It was mind blowing. Now you can just carry around a whole personally configured system on a USB stick. Pretty cool.
I once tried to install Linux around then, not long after ISA cards with Plug n Play became a thing.
Linux: So now to even pretend to get the card to work you have to download and run a tool to generate a config file to feed to another tool so you can then install the driver and get basic functionality from the card (which is all that’s available on Linux). Except the first tool doesn’t generate a working config file - it generates a file containing every possible configuration your hardware supports hypothetically having and requires you to find and uncomment the one you want to actually use. Requiring you to manually configure the card and thus kinda defeating the point of Plug n Play (though I guess that configuration was in software, not by setting jumpers).
Same card in Windows at the time: Install card, boot Windows. Card is automatically identified and given a valid configuration, built in drivers provide basic functionality. Can download software from manufacturer for more advanced functionality.
That soured me on Linux for a long time. Might try it again sometime soon just to see what it’s like if nothing else. ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.
ProtonDB doesn’t have the most positive things to say about my Steam collection, and I imagine odds are worse for stuff not available on Steam.
If you ask around or search, you can get answers easily. You can install games from Epic, Ubisoft etc. using other Linux applications.
Giving you, if you were lucky, VESA graphics and maybe a mouse pointer because XFree86 somehow insisted on being told whether you have a PS/2 or USB mouse. 3d acceleration only with nvidia and that required manual installation because nvidia never provided anything but blobs. IIRC ATI drivers were simply non-existent (didn’t have an ATI card back then), that only changed when AMD bought them. Whippensnappers won’t believe it but once upon the time, nvidia was actually the company to go with when running linux. And Epic didn’t hate Linux yet, UT2004 came with linux binaries on the dvd.
It hasn’t change since mid-2000s if you only talk about the installation process itself. Usually you would have at least some piece of hardware that wouldn’t work out of box and it used to be a lot of work until getting everything in place
thinking that the year 2000 was 10 years ago.
This is patently absurd, 10 years ago was 1994.
Laughs in Gentoo
Windows is only for games; macOS and Linux are for work. Once they catch up, it will be bye-bye Windows.
Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.
been playin games on linux for a long ass time now, with minimal issue.
with almost no issue in the past 3-4 years.
Its caught up.
Pretty much any game short of ones that have invasive kernal DRM run without much issue.
Linux mint is my favorite os been running it many years now no issues with running games. Its a bulletproof OS esecially with timeshift snapshots SteamOS is specifically a gaming os developed by valve for the steam deck but you can installed it on any system . The key is proton which is a windows emulator comparability layer fine tuned by valves Dev team to get most games running on Linux.
Nobara 39.
Its easy and quick to set up, easy to use, and has a lot of ancillary tools and stuff preinstalled to make getting into the gaming easier.
I’m not gonna say its the second coming of christ, or all sunshine and rainbows, so to be upfront and honest… Dualboot at first, if you can. Its, presumably, your first time using linux, so you will run into more roadblocks to start simply due to lack of knowledge and experience on how to navigate things, but you’ll get your baselines down quick and start getting into the windows-like usability and flow.
Games have largely caught up. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted. With WoW, you had to manually copy the files from each CD, save them locally and then run the installer because otherwise the installer would shit the bed and fail halfway through Discs 2 or 3.
The final hurdle for gaming on Linux is anti-cheat and that’s going to be a mountain to overcome. Only two solutions (to my knowledge) currently have native Linux support and those are Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) and Valve Anti Cheat (VAC.) You’re not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.
You’re not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.
Good. Kernel mode anticheat is fucking malware. Anticheat for a game should never have the same power over the system as a driver, which needs those privileges to communicate with hardware.
Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted.
Hey! I was playing LOTRO just fine on Linux back then. It actually worked better on Linux than Windows back then too.
Games is mostly (say 90+95%) there. Windows won’t go bye bye though, MS ensured customers by making government’s and companies sign contracts that will be a bitch to get out of. Expect windows to be around for a long time.
Microsoft has shit developers, but they have great marketing people and lawyers, so many lawyers…
Maybe for home users. Working at an MSP, I can’t see small to medium sized businesses making any changes here anytime soon, especially those that use specialized software built only for Windows.
In my experience, many business applications now run on the Web or are being upgraded to be. Where I work Windows pcs endure only for those who have to do technical drawing, most terminals are Ubuntu updated by ansible scripts and connected to an active directory domain running on Samba. The few PCs with Windows are slowly disappearing as hardware is upgraded ( medium-sized company with about sixty PCs ). There are also a couple of Mac’s used by in-house developers/IT.
So how would I go about installing Linux on my shitty $200 refurbished Dell laptop? Would it continue to support my USB docking station with mouse keyboard and three monitors? What about remoting into work?
I don’t otherwise particularly do anything on it. No gaming or any such thing.
Might have some trouble if it’s a typec dock and the monitors are connected to it. Laptop’s own outputs might also be wonky if there’s a hybrid gpu setup going on, but support for thosr has improved a ton lately. Mkb should work fine out of the box as long as it’s not some unified proprietary bullshit wireless kit with smarfridge integration.
Overall, I would suggest just ripping an image of ubuntu, or pop_os if you got nvidia card, boot off it, just close the installer to try live mode, and see for yourself if everything works. Takes like an hour to do, no installation required. You can even install software, except gpu drivers, as everything would be all wiped on reboot and gpu drivers need reboot, hence popos suggestion as it has them built-in. You can try remmina on it - it’s the most common remote control software, supports both rdp and vnc and a bunch of other obscure protocols.
Yes. One question, what software does your company use to connect remotely?
All I can see is that it’s an RDP extension
Type: remote desktop connection
Otherwise I didn’t see a product name in properties
USB docking station should be supported (unless it’s one of those external battery ones that plug into the bottom of the laptop). Remoting into work is fine but depends on the setup. For example, openssh with rdp works fine, can’t vouch for other solutions but I’m sure you could get them working.
Edit: I have been informed that displaylink docks require additional software. I didn’t even know those were a thing so I don’t know how difficult it would be to setup.
I had to manually install displaylink on Fedora in order to use my USB-C docking station. Its not included in the fedora repos. But it drives 4x1440p monitors
That’s true for any OS though. DisplayLink dock is software dock and must have proper drivers installed to work.
