Bob Smith

Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.

If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.

I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren’t playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

I met up with a group of friends prior to a concert. She was somebody that I didn’t know yet. That changed!

Realistically? For mainstream search? In anything like the top-level results that most people bother to read?

Nowadays, you need to pay Google more than the SEO companies do. Either that, or hope that people specifically search for lemmy posts as part of their search request.

Ubuntu isn’t my favorite, but I used xubuntu for many years. A lot of noise gets thrown around about Snaps, but from an end-user perspective they tend to work fine unless you have very low system constraints. Better than adding a half-dozen repositories that may or may not be around for long. A lot of developers work to make sure that their software runs well in Ubuntu and the LTS releases tend to be a good long-term option if you don’t want any significant changes for a long time.

Even with their regular releases, I daisy-chained upgrades on an old Core2 laptop for something like seven years without any major (computer becomes a paperweight) issues. Sometimes (like with Snaps) Ubuntu insists on going its own way, which can result in errors/shitty OS things that don’t pop up in other distributions. I’ve had to deal with some minor issues with Ubuntu over the years (broken repositories, upgrades causing hiccups, falling back to older kernels temporarily), but I think that you’ll get issues like that regardless of what distro you pick.

What are you trying to build? A work laptop that you’re going to take on trips, a gaming computer, a server? Something else?

For you, what is too much hassle? Are you a new Linux user or an experienced user with no spare time? What are you accustomed to doing when you install an operating system and what do you expect to be preinstalled?

What is your favorite colour?

I didn’t, but only because my solution wasn’t novel or generalized for other people. I made a script to fire up tmux on a ‘primary’ computer with key-based access to my other computers, load up a set of windows and panes, and ssh into each computer. One window would be computers in one section of my home, another window would be computers elsewhere. The only challenge was getting a baseline grasp of the tmux scripting syntax.

I initially set it up to run htop on each computer (dashboard goal, plus easy ability to terminate programs), but the basic setup was flexible. I could set other programs to run by default or and send terminal command updates to each computer from any device that could ssh into the primary computer. Automating updates on a computer-by-computer basis is a better solution, but the setup let me quickly oversee and interactively start multiple system updates at once, from a phone, tablet, or laptop.

About 90% of what I know about ssh, terminal multiplexing, scripting, and diagnostic programs grew from an optimization project.

I had a vague desire to build a one-stop dashboard where I could monitor, update, and control a half-dozen linux computers at once. It was just for fun, but it kept me reading through the manpages for weeks.

Something a bit more out-of-the-box: I used to run 64-bit linux on a 2,1 Macbook Pro. Similar specs, including the same RAM ceiling. The isos are a bit out of date, but you can always install one and then upgrade from there. https://mattgadient.com/linux-dvd-images-and-how-to-for-32-bit-efi-macs-late-2006-models/

At that price range, be sure to carefully check compatibility for your favorite distribution and for any hardware that you intend to use.

For what it’s worth, I have an old HP Stream 7 that currently runs Debian Bookworm. I think that it cost about $100 new. I can use it as a pdf reader and to sync files, but there are plenty of tradeoffs due to the 1gb of RAM, the weak Atom processor, the small amount of built-in storage, the mediocre touchscreen, and the general poor quality of touchscreen interfaces among low-resource window managers. Neither camera works and several distributions can’t support the built-in audio. Screen rotation is a crapshoot. Forget about low-power standby. Some of these issues are unique to my tablet, but some of them are problems that people tend to run into when they try to shoehorn linux into a tablet that wasn’t built with linux in mind. Something like a Pinetab would be a better bet.

I saw another person suggest an aftermarket Surface. If you go this route, carefully research the exact model number to verify that the hardware supports linux and that there is a clean way of installing your preferred distribution.

Another thing worth mentioning. Installing linux can be a special kind of hell. Most distributions don’t have a touchscreen-friendly installer. For my cheap tablet, this meant cobbling together a flash drive, a powered USB hub, a USB keyboard, a USB ethernet adapter, and a USB-OTG cable for the single micro-usb port on the tablet. Then, I had to race the decade-old tablet battery to the finish line during the install process. Plus something about a 32-bit EFI bootloader combined with a 64-bit processor.

I use a tiling WM for everything. Libreoffice, games, Firefox/Chromium, file managers, etc. It all works and it is a great way to handle multiple monitors.

One option is to convert to txt for any text-only epubs that you have. There are a ton of lightweight options if you’re willing to use format-shifted copies on your computer.

Arch seems to target users who are inclined to read the wiki and manpages, so it doesn’t surprise me that beginners run across some saltiness if they approach people who aren’t focused on beginners. Even the installation process seems to be designed as a screening mechanism. It wasn’t a big hurdle when I first tried it out, but it was a small one.

There are plenty of distributions that focus on people who are just getting started. For whatever it might be worth, this includes several distros based on Arch. I usually suggest Mint or Xubuntu over Debian for people with no prior exposure to Linux. Even though I like it personally, I try not to suggest vanilla Arch to anybody. They can try it if they want to, but there are plenty of reasons to try something else instead.

Paper printing is no big deal if you stick carefully to your first thought about linux-compatible hardware.

I use Brother laser printers whenever I need a hard copy. That brand tends to work well with linux, but research the model number in conjunction with the distribution that you’re using before you purchase.

Your point about locked in software is very important. Even in my own industry, some of my earlier jobs relied on custom Windows software for billing, dictation, document creation, and more. A lot of former nonstarters have been pushed to the cloud, but there are still challenges.

On my distro, hitting print in the Office365 web app autogenerates a searchable pdf. As mentioned by others, it is trivial to generate a searchable pdf from LibreOffice as well.

I use linux to run my law office, so it can be done. Most of what I use is web-based these days, so headaches are minor. That being typed, I’ve been using linux off and on since the 1990s, and there was a fair amount of learning involved. A few notes:

-Libreoffice is good enough for document drafting, unless you’re extremely reliant on templates generated in Word. Even then, that’s a few hours of clerical work that you can farm out with, presumably, no confidentiality issues to flag. Also bear in mind that if you end up using different Linux distributions on more than one computer, then you may run into minor formatting differences between different versions of your word processing software. Microsoft Office will be a reliable option unless you run windows as a virtual machine. There are workarounds, but they aren’t business ready.

-Some aspects of PDF authoring can be tricky if you’re doing discovery prep, redaction, and related tasks in-house. This is very workflow-specific, so if you’re not a litigator or your jurisdiction doesn’t have a lot of specific requirements for pdf submissions, it might not be something that you need to worry about. If it becomes a problem, then a Windows virtual machine might be a solution.

-Video support depends greatly on the linux distribution, so you may want to do a bit of research and avoid distributions like Fedora, where certain mainstream AV formats are not supported by default for philosophical/licensing reasons.

-Compatibility with co-counsel and clients will be hit or miss. I don’t let anything leave my office that hasn’t been converted to PDF and I only do collaboration when there is a special request to do so. I can fall back on a computer that I have which runs Office. It sounds like you have more than one computer, so you can have a backup plan.

-Hardware support is critical. If you need to videoconference and it turns out that your webcam doesn’t have a linux driver, then you may be hosed. Research and test on the front-end so that you don’t find yourself in an embarrassing situation of your own making.

-Learning curves cost money. If you’re using an entirely new set of user software AND you’re hopping between different distributions to find the version of linux that works for you, you’ll waste a LOT of time that you could be using to generate billable work.

I’ve used Ardour to capture keyboard midi input before. Not beginner-friendly, but it works if you want to play something, pick a soundfile, edit a flubbed note or two, and add it to a project.

Well, dang! I’m sorry to read that. Codecs are definitely a tricky issue for Fedora.

I ran into something like this the last time that I installed Fedora. They have (or used to have) a fairly hardcore stance about nonfree codecs, which includes anything licensed under MPEG LA.

The codec in your screenshot probably doesn’t include support for H.265 playback - at the very least it isn’t in the list of formats. Here’s a guide that I googled for you: https://ostechnix.com/how-to-install-multimedia-codecs-in-fedora-linux/