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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2620 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?

I always suggest Arch in the spirit of throwing yourself into the deep end - it was my first distro and the learning curve was formative for me. That said I just set up Bazzite for a friend who's primarily interested in gaming, and have been using Debian and Mint for my project machines. I recently migrated my desktop off a Bazzite dual boot to Debian because Bazzite's frankensteinian package management makes it a terrible workstation for me, and then I had to switch to the unstable channel because my 7800 XT doesn't have usable drivers in stable.

WRT aesthetics, I ran Cinnamon on my laptop with a custom theme that replicated the Windows XP look and feel, which was pretty fun for a while. In the last few weeks though I've been moving my machines away from Cinnamon towards XFCE, mostly because Cinnamon's screensaver is kinda broken on multiple monitors of different dimensions and i3 is a little too minimal for me. For funsies I tried NsCDE on my laptop for a few days, but it's a little too alien for my modern kek sensibilities, though I like the retro Motif feel.

I was always scared that I'd break things irreparably.

Ahh, youth. What you do is you pick up the cheapest computer (laptop, desktop, pick what suits you best) you can find on clearance and pave over it with Arch. Specifically Arch, because they try to avoid making decisions for you. Follow the installation guide to the point where the install is finished, you've got your account made, all that. Switch to a terminal, sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root, and intentionally destroy your setup. Do the installation again from the top - blow out your partitions and make them over again, the whole nine yards. Break out of the mindset of being too scared to break things, practice good data hygiene (like keeping your home directory on a separate partition/drive), and know that even if you literally delete your entire OS, you have done that before and it's not really a big deal when you can just backup your home/data directories and rebuild the whole thing from nothing. Then recognize that most breakages you'll encounter are orders of magnitude less destructive to your system than what you just did.

Then fuck around with the explicit intention of finding out daily drive your new system with the knowledge that if there's something annoying you, you can fix it. My first Arch setup on a laptop, I got distracted by solving issues with the graphics drivers and never got around to doing the whole system blowout. Daily drove that laptop for five years and I learned shitloads from doing so.

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