ForbiddenRoot

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.

My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.

so what does Linux have that I need?

That should be the other way around, no? What do you need that Linux has (and Windows doesn’t). Otherwise it’s a case of “solution in search of a problem”. You presently do not seem to have a need as you have mentioned, so ideally you should leave it at that and continue using Windows.

What can motivate me to migrate?

While as I implied above only you can answer that authoritatively for yourself, a few examples of what other people seem to like about Linux might help perhaps -

• “Free as in beer”, so not having to spring for another license if you build another rig
• “Free as in Freedom”, which matters to many but not necessarily everyone
• Better environment for development
• Less susceptibility to malware (not necessarily because of inherent security, but also because Linux is not targeted as much)
• Heavily customizable, at the kernel, desktop environment, other software-level
• Choice of software update mechanisms as well frequency of updates depending on use-case
• Reviving of old computers where Windows would typically struggle to run
• Community participation, though this can be a hit or a miss depending on where you hang out and who you interact with

… and so on.

What is a good Linux to have for a desktop + steam?

There are many, but I generally recommend Linux Mint or Pop! OS for this use-case.

Am I missing something?

No. I think you are correct and mostly even wifi hardware works fine, at least compared to *BSDs. I use Linux across a wide-range of machines, both desktops and laptops, with mostly very recent components. The only other unsupported hardware I have personally come across is some gaming hardware (e.g. Thrustmaster racing wheels) and an add-on sound card (Soundblaster AE9). And of course, some things like DLSS3 with Nvidia do not work.

If the partitioning is fine (GPT with EFI System Partition), it should boot up even if you move the disk to a completely new machine. You will need to re-activate Windows though after booting.

You may have had the ESP on a different drive than the one you moved to the new machine, perhaps?

because if A is the string “-1” and B is the integer -1, JS evaluates A==B as true because reasons

Interesting. If it were the other way around, I think I would have been fine with it (i.e. == used for comparison with type like any other language and === without type). But as it stands now I would hate it if I had to write in JS (but I don’t so it’s fine).

Why is everyone so anxious nowadays?

For me it’s financial, though as a middle-aged person I am nowadays also plagued with metaphysical questions.

About the financial part, I’m actually very well-off but the world has become such a complex place (or it always was and I am only realizing it now at my age) and I have little to no control over most aspects of it. I don’t want to lose what I have worked towards because of geo-politics, climate change impact, global recession, or such things. It’s not an existential crisis for me but there is some amount of anxiety and dread that I previously did not have.

French just blows my fucking mind.

In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D

Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?

Un peu, mais je prefere les baguettes

(and also I just realized I totally don’t know how to make acute / grave accents on my keyboard, if that’s possible at all with an en-US layout)

To eliminate this confusion I propose the days of the month should start from 13.

I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.

The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.

Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P

Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.

I am truly and deeply saddened to hear this. My condolences to his family.

vim or vim-enhanced is one of the first things I install on any distro that doesn’t have it included by default. I have been using it for decades and am so used to seeing Bram’s name come up on the screen whenever I start the editor. His work greatly enriched my programming experience over the years and I am sure for countless other people as well. I don’t know what to say except a heartfelt “Thank you, Bram”.

I’m no huge fan of Windows, but it sounds like you had (No offense) PEBKAC errors.

I think so too and no offense meant to OP as well.

I am an early adopter of all things tech and so I had a Gigabyte Xtreme X670E mobo on pretty much day 1 to go with a 7950X. Everything worked fine on both Windows 11 and Linux despite being a pimped-up mobo and brand new CPU. At this much later date, OP’s B650 mobo should be working without a hitch, especially with Windows (and almost certainly with Linux as well).

Maybe it’s problem is that it’s boring.

Personally, I consider that a feature. Most of my machines are on Debian Stable, though I do keep a distro-hopping laptop around which is on the newly released Mint at the moment. I just use Flatpaks for the odd application that I need the very latest version of (e.g., Yuzu emulator). I will give MX a try sometime, at least in a VM.

This is like a mythical distro for me. I hear about it here and there, usually in the context of it being on top of DistroWatch and why that does not mean anything, but never really known anyone who actually uses it or recommends it.

That doesn’t make it bad or even obscure of course, because even an outstanding distro like openSuse gets very less screen-time nowadays. But somehow this is one distro I have never installed or even had the urge to find out more about.

Someday I want to teach myself emacs so that I can get rid of rest of the operating system.

I’m gonna be that person…

Well, you are not alone. While I too would prefer not to use proprietary drivers, I have had no problems on any of my Nvidia machines as well. Ironically, despite the open source drivers, getting a 7900XTX card up and running was an issue for me for months till distros caught up (with newer kernels and mesa libs), while my 4090 installation was a breeze even on the day it was released.

A lot of problems people have with Nvidia GPUs seem to be installation related. I think that is because the installation tends to be distro-specific and people do not necessarily follow the correct procedure for their distro or try installing the drivers directly from the Nvidia site as they would on Windows. For example, Fedora requires you to add RPMFusion, Debian needs non-free to be added to sources, Linux Mint lets you install the proprietary drivers but only after the first boot, and so on. Pop OS! probably makes the process the easiest with their Nvidia-specific ISO.