476
Your Windows 10 PC will soon be 'junk' - users told to resist Microsoft deadline
(www.express.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
476 points (91.9% liked)
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The day i had ads on my start page i immidiately uninstalled windows. I installed some linux distro its been like three years and ive finally settled on arch. it was hard but fuck ads on the start page and i feel smarter for it
When you swap distros, how do you manage all your files and settings? Do you just save your files externally and start from scratch every time you change a distro?
I don't. I just use a separate drive for /home. And since I just prefer KDE no matter which system I'm using, all my files, settings, layouts, panels, etc are exactly the same whenever I switch out the OS.
Typically your personal files and app settings are stored somewhere in your user home folder, eg under
/home/bob/. Ideally you've set up your system in a way so that the entire/home/folder is stored on its own disk or partition at least. That let's you boot up a different distro while using the same home directory. But even if you haven't set it up separately from the rest of the system, you can still manually copy all those files.Not every single application setting is transferable between distros as they sometimes use different versions but generally it works well. Many apps also let you manually export profiles or settings and reimport them elsewhere later. Or they have online synchronization baked in.
So in my previous experience I never get prompted to create separate partition, but I have seen others use this method in the past, however this should probably be a step in any Linux install wizard.
It should be offered as an option really.
One caveat is that you need to think ahead about how much space you want to assign to each partition. You could end up with your
/home/partition being full while the system partition still has plenty. Or vice versa. You can manually readjust the boundaries but it requires some understanding and can't be done on the fly by a non-technical user. By contrast if everything's stored on the same partition you never have to worry about this.You can, by the way, manually recreate this set up even after the initial set up although it will require lots of free space to shuffle around files (or some external storage to temporarily hold them). Basically what you do is create a new empty partition, copy all your
/home/stuff there and then configure your system to always mount that partition as the/home/directory when it boots. Files are just files after all and the operating system doesn't really care where they come from as long as the content is correct. Once you got it working you can delete the originals and free up the space to be used otherwise.You can have a separate partition for your files so that you change only your OS. Even with windows. This way you'll always keep your files and just need to customize your distro and reinstall your apps when you change between distros
Yeah i kept my files on a seperate drive and just wiped the one with the os. for settings i was trying a different distro and desktop enviroment so those where always a bit different and i started from scratch
I was already using Linux a lot of the time when Windows 7 was out, and seeing Microsoft push ads in the start menu, as well as all the other trash and pointless changes that they included with Windows 8+ just confirmed my decision to leave the Windows ecosystem.
What are you, some kind of Linux prodigy?
arch is basic. It's just minimalise by default.
It has an amazing wiki, extremely active and helpful user forums, and an installer (i think now) or at least a massively helpfully customised shell for initial setup.
you can install arch and make it look like mint or whatever easily, then the only difference is pacman and the amazing AUR
It's not like he's compiling Linux from scratch on day one. Arch is pretty well supported and has a package manager.
Lol i hear this alot about arch users and as a newbie i dont get it. It has been the easiest for me to understand, maybe its the documentation idk i started with endavourOS as well which is a great beginner OS for arch IMO
EndeavourOS isn't pure arch. (I don't mean this in an elitist way. Use whatever is best for you.) Pure arch doesn't come with a desktop, so it sucks for new users.
I would agree but most people dont even know that a DE is different then an OS. I do plain arch now i was just saying it was a good starting point
EndeavorOS has been a great experience for me as well. Also KDE Plasma and now Wayland.
I started with an Arch-based distro and haven't looked back (EndeavorOS. Though I guess it's kind of like Arch easy mode). I have a family member that has been daily driving Linux for over a decade, so that was very helpful during the transition. But after a week or two, I haven't needed his help at all.
My laptop that previously ran Windows 11 is faster than ever.