I just ditched Windows for Pop!_OS (Linux distro). Any advice?

[Manopolus]

I got real tired of some aspects of Windows, and half my software was freeware that was originally designed for Linux, anyway. So I switched. I have no idea what I'm doing, really, but ChatGPT is helping out a bit if nothing else. Chose System76's build (Pop!_OS) because of their work with Nvidia drivers (both of my acer computers have Nvidia graphics cards). First lesson was that I had to uninstall the flatpack version of Steam I accidentally selected and do the .deb install for it instead so that I could have actual game shortcuts in the applications menu without doing a bunch of other crap I don´t know how to do. Otherwise, I´d have to launch everything from the actual Steam app, itself, which I find annoying.

Laptop is still on Windows, mainly because my current printer (Canon) doesn't support Linux, and I occasionally do still need to scan and/or print something. It's also the machine that I use for my television when I want to watch something on the big screen (only one HDMI and one DVI port on my desktop's graphics card, and the monitor I currently have doesn´t use DVI).

Anyway, I've got it all set up now with Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, -- the basic graphics stuff. LibreOffice was already in the distro itself. Also downloaded Proton 9.0 from Steam and tested some games (some oddities, but works okay). Vaguely planning on learning the basics of BASH, but am mostly clueless as yet. Anyway, I was just wondering if there were any Linux users around here that wanted to pass on any wisdom.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I've been using Linux for 25 years now, but as a programmer and not as an everyday regular user.

Your Canon printer likely is supported: I suspect CUPS has some support for it, even if it's not complete, and there likely is a scanner driver for it, too. But the really useful things such as such scan-to-PDF are likely available only in the Windows software. It might be possible to get that software running under Wine, but it could be tricky.

With some work you can get Windows and Linux talking to each other using Samba. There may be tools within Pop! to assist with this.

I do an enormous amount of stuff from the command line and Midnight Commander (remember Norton Commander? Like that, but turned up to eleven.) This may or may not work with your intended workflow; it depends how comfortable you are running the console, learning the shell (bash or c-shell), and the programs that run there.

Find a decent text editor and learn it. My favourite is vim, but it's really nerdy and has a big learning curve, so I'm not recommending it. I've discovered the editor(s) that come with GNOME based environments (and Pop! is one of them) are limited for what I want to do. My preference is Kate, which comes with the KDE desktop, and may or may not be available for Pop!

Linux is a huge ecosystem and there's lots to learn. Unfortunately, all too often Linux users can be unhelpful snobs, expecting you to invest your own time into learning it. My advice there is to keep digging on the web or ask an LLM chatbot lots of questions.

 

[Wudang]

Yeah I use vi/vim as it's always available on every Unix/Linux system but I wouldn't recommend it. Too idiosyncratic. I've used Notepadqq (a sort of port of Notepad++ from Windows) and Sublime more now as it's also on my Mac. Both are good. I haven't tried Kate. If it works for you use it.
These tools are great but I keep forgetting I have them https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix
You'll find some free ebooks on Bash here amongst other stuff https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books
Though try this first, other good books on that website : https://books.goalkicker.com/BashBook/

 

[Wudang]

Try to use only one package manager so it's easier to see what you have installed.
Unless you're a programmer don't take programmers advice on editors. We tend to push the ones we've taken the time to learn and exploit. If you only do something once every 2 years, say, you don't need it to be intuitive or easy as you'll probably have to look it up anyway. 80/20 rule in spades.

 

[LiteBright]

I'm just a regular computer user, not any sort of expert but I switched to Linux on my laptop about 3 years ago and never regretted it. It runs faster, the battery life almost doubled overnight and in 3 years I've had to restart for updates twice. And get this...unlike Windows, the updates have never broken anything! I know that might be hard to believe for windows users but its true...you can actually update your OS without losing features you had before the update!

My work laptop has windows still and it has to update at least once a week, always has to restart to do so and almost always breaks something in the process.

There is no reason to continue pumping money into microshaft. Linux is the way to go, even for novices now.

 

[JayUtah]

All our scientific and engineering supercomputers run some form of Linux. I know many or most of our programmers run Linux desktops. The ones I've tried are quite good now, as opposed to some back in the day when you had to manually configure the raster parameters for your monitor. I'm not afraid of technical details, but that's like asking a motorist to adjust his own valve timing when all he wants to do is dash down the street for a sandwich.

Business needs force me to use a Windows desktop most often at work, but against my will. And I use a Mac desktop for most of my other computing, including at work when I can get away with it. It's UNIX-ish under the hood but has a polished user experience. You can dual-boot most Macs and have them also run Windows, and you can virtualize practically any combination of operating systems. So I'm not really any sort of OS purist. When people accuse me of that, I fire up Hercules on my virtualized server and run a whole buch of old Fortran and S/370 assembly code under IBM's MVS.

Among the Linux desktops I tend to prefer a Debian-based distribution with the Plasma window manager and the KDE widget set. That's what I'm using now to type this, as I'm in one of the labs. I'll have to look into the Pop!_OS distro, as we have no experience with it. For most of our customer-facing needs we need to run a hardened CentOS distro.

I'm not sure I should be giving advice because I approach Linux from the point of view of having used innumerable UNIX systems in science and engineering. I tend to carry over decades-old habits that I wouldn't want to impose on a new user.

Learning one of the popular shells (i.e., command-line processors) seems to be good advice. I would also add learning some of the text utilities, because you can build some pretty impressive tool chains. For example, we sometimes do stuff like:

$ for file in $(fgrep -Ir BadVarName | cut -f1 -d:); do sed -re 's/BadVarName/better_var_name/g' "${file}"; done

I used to Emacs for coding, but I wouldn't wish that learning curve on anyone now these days. There are excellent IDEs such as Eclipse for modern users. And I use vi/vim for editing configuration files and things, which happens a ton on our supercomputers. That's more of a professional-level skill because some form of vi comes with every Linux distro. You can always count on it being there on an unfamiliar system. But whether you need that skill depends on how much text-editing you're going to be doing.

It sounds like device compatibility is your most-needed feature. If you want to try out different desktop experiences, try Oracle VirtualBox and run a few desktops in virtual machines to see which ones you like.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

(Canon) doesn't support Linux

Shouldn't that be the other way around?

 

[Manopolus]

Shouldn't that be the other way around?

Well, I primarily meant that the company doesn´t provide drivers for the operating system like it does for Windows. As I understand it, the Linux-friendly printer brand is Brother, which will probably be my next printer whenever I decide I need one (there might even be one around here in the house somewhere, but I don´t know if it's still functional. It hasn´t been connected to a computer in 20 years if so).

While I get that it's a peripheral device and the language usually goes the other way, the problem isn't that the device is incompatible mechanically.

 

[JayUtah]

As I understand it, the Linux-friendly printer brand is Brother, which will probably be my next printer whenever I decide I need one (there might even be one around here in the house somewhere, but I don´t know if it's still functional. It hasn´t been connected to a computer in 20 years if so).

We use Ethernet-connected Brother printers extensively. Connected that way, they're plug-and-play under Linux. I don't know about direct connections like USB.

CUPS was really a game-changer for printers and Linux. Before then, you could sometimes count on companies to provide Linux drivers. But now it's just not really necessary. I'm lucky to have in-house people who can write device drivers at the kernel level for wonky stuff like home-built robots for assembly and testing. But for consumer-level stuff, it's just hard to believe that there would exist a commercial device that can't be made to work with a modern Linux distro without too much effort. The obvious exception is some of the accelerated graphics hardware.

 

[Manopolus]

We use Ethernet-connected Brother printers extensively. Connected that way, they're plug-and-play under Linux. I don't know about direct connections like USB.

CUPS was really a game-changer for printers and Linux. Before then, you could sometimes count on companies to provide Linux drivers. But now it's just not really necessary. I'm lucky to have in-house people who can write device drivers at the kernel level for wonky stuff like home-built robots for assembly and testing. But for consumer-level stuff, it's just hard to believe that there would exist a commercial device that can't be made to work with a modern Linux distro without too much effort. The obvious exception is some of the accelerated graphics hardware.

Yeah, I haven't really tried yet. But ChatGPT mentioned that there might be issues getting the scanner working specifically. I think it has more to do with scanning into a PDF format than anything. It's an all-in-one, so it's all hooked up through a single USB. Considering I know nothing about drivers, I just figured it makes more sense to just use the laptop, which is still using Windows and has the Canon software for it. The laptop is older, but it's still a Predator bought in 2016 or so if I remember right. Not exactly outdated... was fully compliant with Windows 11 when it became available.

I've gotten the impression from my LLM queries that Canon is basically the worst printer you can have for Linux compatibility. But I can't say that I know much about it personally other than that.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I downloaded Pop_OS and installed it in a virtual machine, then spent a bit of time playing with it.

My first impression is it's sluggish. Yes, it's running in a virtual machine, but when using the terminal I could routinely type faster than the terminal could echo back the characters. When moving the cursor by holding down a cursor key in the terminal or the editor, I routinely overshot my stop point because the cursor wasn't updating fast enough and moved several extra spaces after I took my finger off the key. That didn't happen under Debian 12 running KDE (also in a VM) which is a "heavier" desktop environment. (This probably would not be a problem running on hardware instead of in a VM.)

Resizing and moving windows is noticeably slower.

The desktop is based on GNOME. A quip I saw once said "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." In this context, GNOME is almost perfect . It takes a strong minimalist approach, in contrast to KDE that lets you tweak darned near anything, plus some more.

For example, the format for date/time in the top bar is fixed at Mmm DD HH:MM AM/PM. If you want it to be something else, you have to search out and install an extension, because by default GNOME has declared their default format to be Good Enough For You. Fortunately there are many extensions available from GNOME's web site, and there's even a browser plug-in to assist with installing them.

Since I spend so much time at the command line, I tried the terminal. It's decent, but again not nearly as configurable as KDE's Konsole. For example, Konsole lets you determine the characters to stop at when doing a double-click to select words. You can also set a Konsole tab to alert you if new output appears in it, or if a long-running task stops generating output.

I was most unimpressed with Geary, the email client. I set it up to use IMAP with my email provider, and when it connected I noticed there were several non-spam items in the spam folder. I marked the non-spam ones and tried to bulk move them into the inbox. Several attempts failed. So I installed Thunderbird, and after configuration and connecting to my account it managed to bulk-move the non-spam items on the first try.

The supplied editor is gedit, which is not a powerful as KDE's Kate. For example, in Kate you can select a block of text and start a Find/Replace. Doing a Replace All from this dialogue will replace only within the selected block. In gedit, Replace All ignores the block and replaces all instances within the document. In fact, opening the Find/Replace dialogue closes the block you just selected! Doing a search and replace within a block requires cutting the block, pasting it into a new tab in the editor, changing it there, then cutting and pasting back to the main document.

Also, gedit can't do a rectangular block select/copy/paste.

The picture viewer is decent, but like most minimalist GNOME applications I couldn't find an option to expand smaller sized pictures to the window when clicking through them one by one, although there is an option to do that in the slideshow. The image viewer also doesn't have nice things like a thumbnail page or thumbnail ribbon.

As with any good Linux distribution, there is a huge selection of software available from the Pop! Shop. Try things out. Unlike Windows, installing and deleting software (usually) doesn't leave a lot of crud laying around.

 

[Manopolus]

Yeah, Cosmic is System76's intended desktop long term, but it's still in Alpha. It's not even in Beta yet. As yet, the desktop that comes with Pop!_OS is basically just gnome with some tweaks to the workspaces feature (can dynamically add workspaces... use two, it auto-adds a third blank one, although you can set it up as static, too) and maybe a few other things. I couldn’t really say for sure what the differences are, since it's my first Linux experience. They intend to replace X11 with Wayland, unlike the Gnome version that came with the install.

I don´t do enough with email to care much about a desktop app for it. Tried Thunderbird, just because I'm fond of Mozilla, and then realized that one of my emails won´t accept connections from a desktop app other than its own (proton.me), which costs money. No point if I can´t use both in one place, so I just uninstalled and use the browser. Basically all I use email for is to sign up for accounts and manage the usual security stuff. I do get newsletters, but they're usually deleted unread. Oh, there have been a few other things I've used email for, but it's rare.

Haven't done much with gedit yet. Opened it once or twice trying to troubleshoot my Steam games not showing up in the apps with ChatGPT guiding me (before I uninstalled flatpack Steam and installed .deb Steam, which resolved it immediately). But I probably will install something a bit more featured at some point.

Also got help re-claiming a thumb drive that I tried to use to install it (but failed to write properly for some reason) using the terminal. Rufus makes that impossible to do with the GUI software available (disk). Windows wouldn't even acknowledge that the flash drive existed when plugging it into my laptop, and although disk acknowledged its existence, it refused to reformat it. But it got done. Don't get me wrong... I still have no clue how to do that, but ChatGPT walked me through how to do it step by step in the terminal.

So far, I've mostly tinkered around with things like that and tested out Skyrim w/proton 9 (worked perfectly) and other stuff. Oh, and I moved my dock to the left side... having my workspace squished both on top and on bottom isn't the way I roll. Hell, I think the default position for such things should be on the sides on a widescreen. Otherwise it goofs up the aspect ratio... but I get that the traditional positioning comes from when screens were square.