Thinking about switching to Linux but have some questions
Hi all,
I need to swap out my HDDs this weekend due to some problems and at this point, am getting tired of Microsoft. For the longest time I've stuck with windows because I was big into gaming, but these days not so much. And it seems like all of the games I like are available for Linux these days. So, my questions are : I've heard that every time a new version of Linux comes out you need to completely reinstall your OS. Is this true? I've got a feeling it may be partially true, but there is more to it. I'm assuming you only need to do this if you want the latest overall version, like Windows, but you get minor updates and can keep running it for years? How do games run on it? My primary game (be nice..) is Minecraft and other games would be Half life 2, TF2, Counter Strike Source etc. I also run emulators for NES/SNES etc. If I lose 5-10 FPS over it, it's not a deal killer. I'll be installing a 250GB SSD + 1TB WD Green this weekend and ditching my two 1TB drives that are showing signs of trouble. System specs going by memory are : I5 750 running stock. EVGA P55 SLI motherboard. EVGA GTX 460 video card. 12GB Gskill Ripjaws ram. I expect it will run any version of Linux fine, but would like opinions on that as well. The last I tried was a few versions of Ubunutu and had no complaints but that was back in 2008-2009. All opinions are welcome. |
Welcome to LQ!
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I know that there are NES and SNES emulators for Linux, so that's covered. Quote:
The operating system itself doesn't need a lot of space, I have a netbook at home that only has a 4GB SSD and Linux fits just fine on it (although it isn't a "fully-featured" install). Quote:
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Another distro that is commonly recommended to people new to Linux is Mint. It is based off Debian (or Ubuntu, I can't remember now), so like with Debian you've probably heard of and used Synaptic and/or apt-get. Hope this helps! |
Hi maples, thanks for responding!
I was planning on using the SSD for programs as well and hoping to run lean for once. Just the stuff I use often will be installed so I think 250GB should be plenty for everything. The 1TB I'd use for music, pictures etc. I'll take a look at my current Steam folder to see how big it is, but I have a feeling it's scary big right now. I wouldn't be surprised at 80GB. Just after I posted I learned about Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which is good for 5 years. I don't mind doing it every 2 years or so, but every year or less is kind of pushing it in my opinion. I used to reinstall Windows 98SE every 2 months or so, but I'd rather not go back in time. :) I'm glad to hear Nvidia drivers are known to be decent for Linux. Regarding 12GB of ram. Yeah, I went from 4GB to 12GB and never noticed a single change. I had hoped Windows 7 would cache more, and maybe it does but it never mattered. Minecraft also seems to refuse to use more than 2GB or so no matter what you change. I gave it 8GB to use and it still peaks at just over 2. |
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If I can recommend it, you coming from Windows I would highly suggest a *buntu, most likely Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Kubuntu looks nicer in my mind and has many more features to play with. Vanilla Ubuntu I never recommend only out of my own never ending troubles with Unity these days. It's always one error after another and I got tired of it. KDE stuff is more integrated as well I find. Stick with an LTS version, current being 14.04.2. Again only from personal experience, LTS are the best way to go, I've always had trouble with non LTS releases. |
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Glad to hear I'm not the only one playing Minecraft. I only play survival mode and have been mainly playing the same game since April 2012. Though, I started a hardcore survival game around a year ago that I play from time to time. Hardcore makes you a little more careful and the game a lot scarier. One wrong move and it's all gone. |
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet...
With Windows, you get what you get. Whatever Microsoft rubber stamps as their "Release" version is what gets released, bugs and all. With Linux you can pick what level of antiquity/beta-testing you want to go with. Something like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. are pretty aggressive with their releases. They'll push out a package version soon after it's released publicly, sometimes still in beta or even alpha. As a result, you get new features very soon after they're released, but it also means you become a testbed for those same new features. You need to familiarize yourself with bug reporting, and don't get upset when a routine update breaks something. These distros also typically have a very fast release cycle, and if you want to keep receiving security updates you'll need to update with them (you'll need to reinstall once a year with Fedora, for example). On the other hand, distros like RHEL/CentOS, Debian stable, etc. are quite a bit more cautious with their releases. You'll often have to wait months or even years after a package version is released publicly before it'll be pushed out to you. As a result, you don't get any new features when they're added to programs, instead you get an old, tested, rock solid version that won't break on you. If you need a newer version of a program or library, it's up to you to go download the source code from the provider's website and compile it yourself (sounds daunting, but it's usually pretty straight forward). These distros are also supported for YEARS. With CentOS you get security fixes for 10 years after the initial release. CentOS 7 was just released last July, and will be supported through June 2024. Those are the two extremes, but there are hundreds/thousands of Linux distros out there that run the gamut in between. For servers I usually stick with CentOS, and for laptops or other machines where I need a bit more recent hardware/software support I usually go with OpenSUSE, which is somewhere in between the extremes I listed before. You get to pick what works for you. |
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With Linux, it's very important to research compatibility before purchasing a device. Regards... |
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EDIT: Also, I second suicidaleggroll's post above. That's one of the best explanations I've seen in a while comparing different distros. |
I beg to differ about putting /home/ on the spinny rust -- the files within /home/ are accessed fairly regularly and may include things like "texture chache" for games. Yes, using the SSD for cached things will mean it ages earlier but I think you need to ask yourself whether that matters.
I should also add that moving to Linux will result in you being very annoyed at yourself, Linux, this forum and the world in general -- the first install is likely going to be wrong in some way you only learn a few months from now. |
Curious on everyone's thoughts regarding MS buying Minecraft and future support for Linux?
Obviously they still are supporting it, but who thinks they will intentionally stop? |
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Worst case scenario is I give up and reinstall Win 7. Honestly, I think the hardest for me is going to be getting used to no file extensions and the way partitions are identified. |
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The drive lettering/partitioning/mounting/filesystem setup is SO much nicer than Windows. That's one of the best features of Linux and Linux-like OSs. Rather than having a separate directory structure for each mounted device, with arbitrary names like C, D, etc., there is ONE directory structure. Each device is given a name that actually makes sense (sda is the first physical disk, sdb is the second physical disk, sda1 is the first partition on sda, and so on), and can be mounted at any point in that common directory structure to hold its contents. Want /home to be on the second partition of the third drive? Then add one line in /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sdc2 at /home and you're done. It's still /home, still referenced as /home, still backed up as /home, but it physically lives on whatever partition of whatever drive you decided to mount there. Want to move /home from a subdirectory of / on your root drive to its own partition on its own drive? Mount the new partition somewhere else temporarily, move all of the contents of /home onto that new spot, then remount the new partition at /home and you're done. Network shares, loopback mounts, iso files, etc. are also mounted at a location of your choosing in the same directory structure in the exact same way as physical drives. It's all seamless. |
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Ah, Maybe I'm thinking of OSX regarding no extensions? I would assume if I put an SSD in and have two partitions, this would end up sda1 and sda2 and my 1TB with 1 partition would be sdb1? Or do they start at 0? Do USB drives and optical drives show up as "sd**" ? |
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Note that because sda/sdb/sdc can swap around depending on when you plugged them in or in what order they were detected on boot, modern OSs use unique identifiers for system drives instead, such as UUID. This makes the fstab a little more complicated to look at, eg: Code:
UUID=6113b48a-64a2-4bc5-a646-3b15555615a2 / xfs defaults 1 1 Code:
$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/6113b48a-64a2-4bc5-a646-3b15555615a2 |
One note of caution: I've had problems, in general, with WD Green drives. They tend to 'save energy' but they're slow. Go with an enterprise-grade SATA or SAS drive, and don't keep yourself small at a single terabyte.
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I run Dosbox to play old games.
When I look at something like this that has the option to download it for Debian, will that work on distros that are based on Debian like Mint and Ubuntu?? |
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Sadly, 1TB is as much as I could do right now. I went with the Green because the only thing the drive will be doing is music which is mainly mp3s and pictures. 80% of the time the drive isn't even spinning. The 250GB SSD should handle anything I want any kind of speed out of, for now. I have a 150GB Raptor sitting on the shelf because it's "too slow" for an OS these days. That, and I found them to be unreliable as well. The PC I'm using right now has a 74GB Raptor for the OS still chugging along though. |
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My Steam folder definitely needs to slim down.
This is after ignoring it for many many years and just leaving things I don't play anymore. |
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Most Linux distros don't need a lot of drive space. The root partition (where most of the operating system is stored) on my laptop is only using about 8GB, and I could slim that down a LOT if I really needed to. (Mostly programs that I've installed, used a few times, then forgotten about.) So even if you put /home (and, as a result, your Steam games) on the SSD with the operating system, you aren't going to see a storage issue any time soon. Hope this helps, and good luck! |
It might also be worth mentioning that Gnu/linux does n't duplicate dependencies so much as windows based api's and so is faster and saves space, how much difference this makes on java based games, I don't know but as a rule of thumb??
Fred. |
Something weird happened tonight and I'd like opinions on it.
As I mentioned, my two HDDs are questionable due to them all of a sudden showing 400+ bad sectors each out of no where. I noticed it after doing a Windows update and restarting at which point Windows did a checkdsk which really surprised me and lead me to looking at the SMART data. Anyway, the system was fine for the most part until I tried Xubuntu from the DVD. I burned a DVD and tried it out for a bit just to see what was what. When I went to reboot, Windows now says it's boot manager is damaged and must be repaired but I need the disk which I have no clue where it is and don't really care right now. I've got a feeling this has nothing to do with Xubuntu but rather perhaps another sign of a failing HDD? What does everyone think? I'm typing from Xubuntu right now as I decided to just install it on a tiny 32GB SSD I had my Minecraft on until my new drives come. So far, the main issue I'm having is I can't get Minecraft.jar to open as an execuatable by double clicking even after selecting it under preferences. The only way I can get it to open is from Terminal and then I couldn't get the game to run, yet. :) I'm falling asleep so I think I need to give up for tonight. I just wanted some opinions on whether or not Trying out Ubuntu from the DVD could've had anything to do with Windows boot manager getting damaged. |
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Yeah, I don't think Xubuntu would touch the MBR unless you actually went to install it to the hard drive. You might want to try getting the diagnostic utility from the manufacturer of the drive in question and see what it says. ;) Regards... |
I wouldn't even try using a diagnostic utility. It sounds like those drives are failing very quickly. (But that doesn't matter, because you have a backup, right? :)) If you haven't backed them up recently, I'd suggest trying to get the important stuff copied off of them as soon as possible.
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I also keep all of my stuff separate from my OS drive so it's easy to back up. Sadly, I can't say the same for any of my friends or family that any time I need to fix something they can't tell me where all of their pictures are. It seems really strange that the drive is failing that fast, I've never had a drive fail to be honest going all the way back to my IBM autoparking 30MB MFM drives. I didn't even realize there was a problem other than for months now Chrome was taking forever to open for some reason, which may still be unrelated. But, Windows 7 updated the other night and when it restarted it did a checkdisk on everything and that got me concerned. So I ran CrystalDiskInfo and both of my drives have a bunch of bad sectors now and pending sectors which I've never seen pending sectors before and last time I checked, they were still pending. I try to keep an eye on the SMART data from the day I install the drive just so I have an idea of what's going on. My only guess of what happened and why both drives could be failing is either because they are both the same exact drive and age (Hitachi 1TB), or, more likely, my son is trying to learn how to walk and he used my tower to pull him self up and he knocked it around a bit when he fell back down. I know drives don't like shock like that when spinning, but I didn't think the tower rocked that much. I was more caught up in the moment than worried about the computer at the time so I didn't really pay attention for obvious reasons. What I don't understand is if the damage was caused by that, why would more sectors be failing after the fact? Sorry for the long response. |
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https://appdb.winehq.org/ |
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So what distros does everyone like and how do you recommend to install it e.g. separate swap partition, where to put home etc?
I still don't follow exactly what home is? So far, I'm liking the sound of Xubuntu 14.04 lts but Mint also seems tempting? A guy I work with gave me a Netrunner 14.1 disc to try but from what I saw that's an energy pig? I like light weight and stable. |
For playing Windows games on Linux, you should investigate Crossover:
https://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/ Good luck making the switch. Your computer will be far more secure and stable on Linux than Windows. I don't play games, but I have a multimedia PC running Linux in my living room. It acts as my DVR and DVD player. I also use it as a file sever for a smaller computer in my bedroom, use it for web browsing, and sometimes do video transcoding and editing on it. I haven't rebooted it in months. It has Xubuntu installed on it with Mythtv for my television stuff. I'm notified of security updates automatically. If you use Ubuntu or one of its variants, you will find lots of help on the internet and it can be upgraded without re-installing the OS for years. It is possible to upgrade to a newer version of the OS using the internet to download and install everything (similar to installing a new service pack on Windows). |
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I got Windows back up and running and am trying out a HDD test program.
At first, I thought this was normal until I started the test on my second identical drive which produces almost a straight line near the top. |
I'd recommend getting a mix of live CDs like from ubuntu and fedora and as many others as you can find. Just boot up with the cd and give it a shot. And make sure to try both gnome and KDE. These are the two most common desktop environments, basically they are the graphical interface and give the operating system its look and feel. My preference here is KDE.
Thanks, The Cheesy Animation Factory -3D Home Interior Design |
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As for partitioning, that's another question that eventually comes down to personal preference and what you plan on doing with the computer. If you plan on trying several distros, then a separate /home will be very helpful, because all of your data can be shared between the distros. Swap is also a very debatable topic. Windows uses a paging file saved somewhere on the C: drive as its "swap" space. While I'm fairly certain that Linux can do that, usually you set aside a separate partition for swap. If you plan on hibernating the computer, then your swap needs to be at least as big as your RAM. But if you don't want hibernation, then I'd suggest not using swap (or having very little) because I doubt that you'll ever go over the 12GB of RAM that you have installed. Quote:
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/home is where your files (those associated with your login live). So you get all rights to /home and all sub directories under it that you may create.
As to where /home is, let me try to add my explanation. Its got to do with the file system and mounting.
I hope you see how your /home (which may be on /sda2/yourName is different from my /home which may be on /sda2/myName. When a new user is created an entire profile is created, the specific user's /home reference is stored along with the basic logon information to render correctly and distinctly without disturbing another users' file structure or data. |
Thank you for responding.
I think I get what home is now. I'm downloading Mint 17.1 as we speak as it looks kinda nice. |
there are many considerations when choosing a distro
the 2 basic lines are Debian & RedHat while debian is a community based distro, ubuntu not so much. I wasn't able to find anything Debian based, community driven, user friendly distro. I like Mageia which is community based & user friendly on the RedHat line. continuity mageia<mandriva<mandrake back to the early days of linux. new versions come out yearly, moving to a new version without a clean install is no problem Mageia Control Center [drak tools] has most any tool you might need, with a GUI... https://www.mageia.org/en/ |
Mageia is a good choice for new users. I started on Mandrake back in 2002. You should have an easier time getting started with Linux now then I did when I started using it.
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Re wireless devices - disagree with previous poster - I use lots of different wireless devices for work and have virtually no problems. Trying the same devices on friends' Win systems is a different kettle of fish. In terms of distros, we used Fedora for many years but have finally moved away to the Debian family. IMHO Unity is truly horrible but I am currently running Mint with Mate and it's very usable. Tip - NEVER go back to Windoze. I've been using Linux 100% of the time for about 10 years - did a bit of to-and-fro with legacy apps for the first couple of years and now never look back (except with a smug satisfied face !). |
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12 GB ram!? Well, if you are unsure about how smooth can be you transition to a full linux user you don't need to install anything on hdd with that amount of ram! Go live! Use any livedvd iso image or usb stick to run a live linux session! Is not a joke, with that amount of ram you can do a lot of normal linux user work, including gaming, without any need to reboot, FOR MONTHS! Yeah, you eyes is ok and you read correctly, i done that personally with a very good live distro: Sabayon Linux Very good to work in prolonged linux live session with almost full usability, i mean in linux you can really upgrade you video drivers in a live session without a need to reboot! Any software upgrade or new install is very smooth in rolling based linux distros like sabayon linux and entropy package manager is very good If you were still afraid about going to command line for a good use of entropy package management infrastructure and gentoo world you can try Ubuntu family pathway, tested in live session for usual new software installs and causal work or games but not so extensive like my monster live session uptime in Sabayon Linux ( was an aprox. 40 days marathon with usual upgrades and special test for things like live graphic drives updates to see if i can to that ) Unfortunately i can't recommend recent Sabayon Linux version for a final install to hdd because Anaconda installer, used by Sabayon Linux, is really buggy and very unreliable especially for a new linux recruit. For a successful install you need strong linux karma, but fortunately any ubuntu is just good for that. Because for windows to linux transition kde is the best smoot path for a quick relearning of some os handling jujus kubuntu is a good alternative for a trouble free full hdd install If you are still interested i can write more about small things that can enable you to test any decent linux distro in live sessions for as much uptime as you want For example in an live session ubuntu use open source drivers, good for stability but not so good for serious gaming instead sabayon linux is between the few linux distro to use special haiku power to enable that from very beginning so you can use you graphic card power at full potential But Sabayon Linux iso can't be convinced to boot from an usb stick who use grub as the boot manager, tested personally with multiple versions, and that means you need to pull the dd weapon to do that and now you will use an 8GB usb stick as an 2 GB hdd already 100 used and to recover the lost GB you need another dd shot who will kill the written iso image! In contrast any *buntu family iso is dead simple to setup to be grub friendly and that means an multi distro linux live usb stick with enough free space who can be used by that linux live session to save you work, documents, musics and even movies! And so on! So, in short, with so much ram first try a live linux session and see how much you can resist in the linux world. If after some prolonged time you do not give up then is time for a real full hdd linux install |
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