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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   617 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 23, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'll be installing Linux on my laptop finally and my parents celebrate their 28th anniversary tomorrow. Do drop distro and or gift suggestions.

Linux always seemed appealing but I never got around to using it as I was always scared that I'd break things irreparably. Plenty of people toy around with their machine and make it pretty fast or aesthetic (unixporn is a cool sub). Does anyone do the same?

This year, get your parents the gift of Linux. Conventional wisdom says that for happiness, experiences are better than possessions. I hear Gentoo is an experience.

I have a big breakdown here for both disto recs and general tips and tricks, and I'll stand by it. I'm running an arch hypr variant, and it's a good learning experience and looks great, but it's not really ideal as a daily driver or for people that are not techies -- Linux Mint, Ubuntu, or even Elementary/Zorin will probably be better experiences your first time around.

It's very hard to break things irreparably with Linux, but it's unfortunately easier-than-Windows to get your machine into a state where a fresh install will be easier than cleaning things up. Manjaro is okay, but I will caution that if you aren't into tech (commandline) debugging it will quite happily let you get into goofy states. Even moreso than in Windows world, having a good backup setup is very important.

If you're planning to dual-boot, I strongly recommend increasing the size of your EFI partition to 200MB-500MB. It's not often an issue, but it's a lot less painful to handle before you've got your whole computer setup.

For gifts for parents, depends a lot on the people.

If you want to get weird, I really enjoy tiling windows managers: instead of floating windows, they are snapped to a configurable non-overlapping layout. I feel like most people's need for multiple monitors is just a desire for tiling that their system doesn't support. I personally use i3 but there are several pretty similar options. I could share a config with vim style bindings if that floats your goat.

Windows PowerToys (a non-official set of enhancements authored by actual Microsoft devs) has one plug in that's an excellent tiling manager. I should probably use it more, as a 4k 49" TV at 2 feet away has more visual real estate than I know what to do with. Otherwise I'd get a second monitor, but there's literally no room on my desk.

Oh neat. I'll have to check that out for my gaming rig. First glance it seems like it is pretty limited in comparison, but probably about 70% of the value.

I'm a CS prof and I use debian. If you're into programming at all, then I'd recommend ubuntu (which is based off debian but designed to be "less ideological" and more "beginner friendly"). Most tutorials for programmers (and thus most advice from LLMs) assumes debian/ubuntu.

I second this. Start with Ubuntu, go from there once you get comfortable. Fedora would also be a good choice if you want to get into sysadmin stuff, since RHEL is so popular in the infrastructure world.

I've been meaning to set up some sort of Linux distro on my retired PC. It's been collecting dust ever since I assembled a new one half a year ago. Ubuntu perhaps?

Not sure what I'd do with it though. Guess I'll just mess around and learn a few things about the non-Windows world of computing... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have been using Pop! OS on laptops that don't support Windows 11. It seems nice.

Just a caution to the OP though: I've been down this road a few times, and family members did not really appreciate the benefits of Linux compared to the hassle of not being able to use the Windows apps they are used to. Even the ones I thought for sure only used web and email. In every case, I ended up having to abandon the effort.

I'm getting manjaro, it's recommended to noobs and I've been trying to get serious with my programming journey. I couldn't get Hugo and go to run properly on my wsl and that ensured I start backing stuff up. Happened last night.

Windows and Mac are both bad operating systems.

Don't get Manjaro, it's Arch for noobs, not Linux for noobs. If you want to run Arch for bragging rights, run Arch. If you need Linux for your resume and general knowledge, run some form of Ubuntu. IBM really screwed the pooch when they gutted CentOS, so now there's less demand for RPM-based distros from the corpos.

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