BananaTrifleViolin

Out of interest, why do you use thorn to represent “th”?

EDIT: Nm, read your profile; I did wonder if it was to fuck with AI. Fighting the good fight.

Sounds like good news; more sponsorship for KDE and an LTS release which will benefit all users.

Well just FYI, you could enable the Kubuntu backports to move to the latest version of KDE and it’s software?

EDIT: Nm, looks like the version in the backports is from 2025

I’m confused - just tested this on my Dolphin and I can right click anywhere (including blank areas and other columns) in the row in Detailed mode, and with or without expandable folders on. I don’t need to select it first with LMB. Also if I right click, close the menu and scroll with scroll wheel I can even select multiple items.

I’m using version 26.04.3, and KDE Plasma 6.7.3.

Well the other side of that is managing software with hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development over it’s lifetime is also hard. There is a sunken cost fallacy with X11, and X11 was constantly extended to be what people needed it to be rather than the best design for the problems arising.

Having said that, I’m not sure Wayland is the ideal solution. X11 doesn’t get in the way of solutions to problems, while Wayland really does. We needed a new and modern display server, but the Wayland project has decided to make that quite restricted - I personally think the security model is too far in the other direction from X11.

Are your windows drives mounted in linux? If so comment them out in fstab or nofail them as a minimum, although it wouldn’t normally manifest as a root drive error (unless you’ve set up a strange mount point for the windows drives outside /mnt on root or even in home folder? or do you have them listed above your root drive in fstab so they are trying to mount first and that fails?).

Also you said elsewhere your linux drives can be “seen” in windows. Just to be clear, you’ve not mounted the drives in Windows right using a tool like Ext2Fsd? Because if so, go into windows and unmount the drive.

And have you disabled fastboot? Not just rebooted but disabled fastboot completely?

So I’m not condoning or condeming.

I would say you can dual boot linux - that is have TWO entirely separate Linux installs on your PC. Have one be your main Linux desktop, and have a separate partition which you boot into to use for riskier stuff. Just ensure it has no access at all to your other drive and be careful mouting peripherals like USB drives. That way you can get full native experience with your PC, without having to sacrifice performance for a VM set up. I would also set up a VPN to run at all times within that 2nd Linux install, with kill switch for the network if it disconnects.

I’d say distro choice for newbies should probably come down to the following questions:

• What are you using Linux for / what device will it go on? A desktop distro is very different from distros for servers, or single board devices like Raspberry Pi. Also even for a desktop, a modern PC versus an older device changes things up too.

• Which desktop do I like the look of the most? If you like the look of KDE, go for something KDE based like OpenSuSE or Kubuntu or Fedora KDE spin. If it’s Gnome then Fedora, or Ubuntu or OpenSuSE Gnome. If you want something windows like and straight forward, then Linux for Cinnamon. If you want something newer then Pop_Os! for Cosmic

• What kind of release schedule? Do you want something stable and robust; big well tested upgrades every few years but otherwise just something very reliable - then go for Debian. Want something cutting edge with all the latest packages then go for a rolling release distro like OpenSuSe or Fedora or Arch based distros.

• How popular do you want it to be for support? If you want to have lots of simple advice and tutorials then maybe go for something thats been widely popular like Mint or popular and around for a long time like Debian. If you want a technical challenge but with good documentation then go for Arch. Otherwise most mainstream distros will have support or you can learn to turn generic advice to your chosen distro.

• Does the distro’s ethos or location matter to you? If not then go by other factors. Location generally doesn’t matter too much, but if it does to you (e.g. such as the legal system the orgs are under governance with), then maybe for European distros like Mint, or OpenSuSe. If you don’t mind American based then maybe Fedora. etc. Similarly ethos - free software only vs proprietary software.

Moving away from Ubuntu makes absolute sense from what they describe.

I do wonder though, is basing a distro on Debian Testing a good idea? I understand them not wanting to go to the Debian stable as they already have issues with big drift for the cutting edge tools they want to ship breaking have the unintended consequences of breaking stable software. But Debian Testing will add in a constant shift in all the packages; they may be more recent but there is a much greater exposure to bugs.

Tuxedo’s OS will itself become a testing ground for packages in a way it wasn’t before. They’re both moving away from Ubuntu AND moving away from a LTS base. Though I suppose they can always re-base to Debian Stable at it’s next big release if they do find it too cumbersome.

Still, I wonder if this will happen with other distros. I know Mint has a Debian flavour which is seemingly described as a backup “plan B” in-case they felt the need to shift. I can also see the constant forcing of Snap into the ecosystem, and now the vague AI stuff that Tuxedo quote would also prompt a lot of distros to decide how dependent should they be on Ubuntu going forward.

Before you do anything, backup /home.

You can reinstall your system while preserving and expanding your /home partition; this is probably the cleanest and safest way to sort your disk. It allows you to move the boot and filesystem partitions to the start of the disk while keeping /home untouched, and then separately resize /home to fill the rest of the drive. You could not reinstall and manually move the partition but it’s slow and riskier when messing with a boot and main filesystem partition; much easier to start again tbh.

I’d get a USB and install Ventoy on it. Ventoy is a great bootable USB tool that lets you drop multiple different bootable ISOs on it (instead of reflashing the drive every time) & pick one at boot; great for installs and also to keep around as a recovery drive. I’d then put on it an ISO file of your preferred linux distro, and also a separate ISO file of a good live distro for recovery. GParted Live is particularly good USB live distro for this because resizing the partition is the aim, but almost any good USB Live Distro will do

I’d then boot up the USB drive and select the ISO for your Linux distro’s installer. During install, in the partition section, I’d then use the partition tool in your installer. Dlete all the windows partitions (sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4), and then delete the exisiting boot (/boot/efi) and root file system (/) and create new ones at the beginning of the disk: 1gb /boot/efi and 85gb / system partiton as you have now, and ensure the existing /home partition is kept and mounted as /home in the new install. You’ll have loads of free unpartitioned space; leave that for now.

After the system is reinstalled, I’d boot in, check everything is ok, and then restart and boot the USB again, this time selecting GParted Live. Then with GParted Live, I’d resize the /home partition to fill all the empty space.

But as I said, before you do anything, backup /home. Also before you do anything you can use a partition tool now (like KDE Partition or Gparted) to add a label/name to your /home drive so there is no confusion when you use use the Linux installer or Gparted later. But it should be clear from the size alone.

Switchdesk is a GUI for changing the default desktop once they’re installed, not for installing desktops.

The top of the page you link explains how to install alternative desktops which is using DNF. The GUI route to do this would be to use a DNF frontend like DNFDragora and search for the relevant desktop metapackage, and then install that.

NixOS config just sets Fstab. The issue was “nofail” was not set. This config calls that out which is good, but the issue isn’t fstab, it’s wherever OP got guidance on automounting drives in fstab as that guidance clearly failed to highlight the importance of the nofail mount option.

The issue isn’t fstab. The nixos thing posted there would have the exact same issue: if nofail wasn’t included in the configuration, the system would go to emergency mode when it can’t find a drive.

Fstab is the “File System Table”, and NixOS still uses it. In your case, a non-essential auto-mounting drive was not correctly flagged as “nofail” in your Fstab; when the system couldn’t find that drive it treated it as essential and locked the system down.

This is very frustrating, and I’ve been there myself by accident but the system does this for good reason. When you have a drive listed to automount in fstab without the “nofail” flag set, if the drive is unavailable the system will boot into emergency mode. This is because without “nofail” it is deemed the drive is an essential part of the system, and Linux won’t boot to prevent unintended damage. A drive might be unplugged or it might be failing and corrupted; but the OS has no way of knowing why the drive isn’t there; it juts knows it’s essential and locks itself down to allow you to fix the problem and prevent damage.

Emergency mode is a bit daunting, but booting into it when a essential drive is missing is actually a safety feature to prevent you experiencing data loss or unintended consequences.

The real issue here is not how fstab works, but rather wherever you got guidance on auto-mounting a drive in Linux. You have to actively set up a drive to automount (linux by default only automounts the root system) - so either you yourself edited the fstab or you used a GUI tool to do it. Fedora does not do this automatically. Whatever guide you followed is the problem here: A good guide should have explained how fstab works, and particularly what “nofail” is and how important it is. If it was a GUI method (like Gpart of KDE Partition Manager), then they also include methods to mark a drive as non-essential (in KDE Partition Manager for example, when setting up a mount point you’d need to ensure “Don’t prevent the system from booting if not mountable”). The guide you followed should have flagged this things up. I know it seems harsh but brutally, you did this. It can be a tough pill to take with linux but the more you tinker, the more you are responsible for when things go wrong; so it’s honestly really useful to actually learn how the things you’re changing work.

If you’d like to understand fstab, the Arch linux wiki has a decent overview: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab
It links through to a page on mount options in fstab for ext4 file system, which includes nofail and many other options: https://man.archlinux.org/man/ext4.5#Mount_options_for_ext4

I would go through your fstab and ensure that any other auto-mounted drives not essential for boot (e.g. media drives or external drives or USB drives) are marked as nofail. Last thing you want is being locked out of yourself if an unessential drive does fail, as emergency mode can be tedious way to problem solve that issue. But before you make any changes, back up your fstab file, and also briefly learn how to use emergency mode (you probably already have learnt how to manually mount the root file system in emergency mode from Chatgpt, but this is an essential first step to fix most problems in emergency mode)

The big difference between distros is really how they build their distro and for what ends. Some distros are “general purpose”, some are focused on specific roles/tasks like gaming or programming or servers, some are about stability, others are about cutting edge features. And you also have different underlying design philosophies - OSS vs proprietary, or Ext4 vs BRTFS, or Immutable vs mutable, pre-packaged vs build yourself.

So yeah, distro choice really does matter. The wide range of choices don’t exist because people are being contrarian; they exist because linux can be shaped to different purposes and goals.

But I think the message to new users is also correct: distro choice doesn’t matter much if you’re starting out and just want a basic desktop environment. Whats going on in the backend or the design philosophy of the distro doesn’t change the experience for most end users doing day to day tasks. A KDE or Gnome desktop environment with Firefox will feel the same, and gaming or word processing will be largely the same. It’s when you want to go beyond generic use that the distro choice starts to matter…

Yeah and in reality people are lazy and go for the easiest route (not a criticism; it’s just human nature). The AUR is popular because it’s easy to download from; the problem is that it was based on the assumption that “someone” is keeping it secure. As it was so popular people assumed that it must be secure because everyone else is using it, and particularly with reassuring voices on tech forums who make a it a badge of honour to use the AUR with Arch. So the AUR has been normalised for lots of users.

It’s a bit like how Wikipedia is trusted by lots of people but in reality there are huge issues with bias and factual errors. People seem to forget/?ignore the warnings that Wikipedia should never be treated as a primary source - because it’s quick and convenient to just look at what’s on Wikipedia and believe it.

I saw someone saying they use Arch because Arch + AUR is the closest you can get to a Windows-like experience on Linux; the AUR provides a huge range of software. The problem is that the Windows-like experience is the ultimate open trust based network. You can download software from anyone anywhere and launch it on your computer. Windows is also a hotbed of malware and viruses as a result, even with the restrictions that Microsoft has put on users over the years.

Securing the AUR is nigh on impossible I think; it’s hard enough for distros and OSS projects to find enough people to maintain close trust-based systems in popular projects let alone the people needed to do the code audits and package checks for 100k+ user submitted packages. Maybe they can change their model a bit though - have a curated section of popular packages that do undergo some kind of audit and “certification”. I think it’ll survive this as it’s a popular resource for all it’s issues, but trust has rightly been dented. And in fairness that was a false trust as the AUR has never pretended to be anything other than what it is: people have chosen to accept the warnings that they use it at their own risk.

Can you enable DDC/CI in the monitors on-screen menus?

If so, and if there aren’t drivers available (I can’t find drivers when searching MF2208-A), then if you can enable DDC/CI you can use 3rd party tools to control the brightness. Display Dimmer and ClickMonitorDDC are 2 I found on a quick google.

If Linux can control the monitor, then it sounds like a lack of drivers for Windows but the display should still support DDC/CI; 3rd party tools do sometimes still work in this scenario for DDC/CI in Windows.

How small is your smallest device? BTRFS doesn’t have a minimum size, but practically probably 50-100mb is just about doable before even just setting things up get complex. Having said that though, it’s copy-on-write and has overhead as a result, so may not function well below 1gb.

ZFS meanwhile really won’t work well below probably 8gb. It’s also copy-on-write but with a lot more overhead due to how it works. It really works best on big drives and filesystems.

If your old storage is in the mb range, then really neither will help you achieve what you want.

BTRFS and ZFS do offer the same benefits as NTFS with regard to compression and speeding up some slower devices (due to lowering the actual read/writes needed to achieve the same result as the data is compressed into a smaller space and decompressed rapidly by the PC in memory), but NTFS can go be used on much smaller disk sizes due to how it works. BTRFS and ZFS are designed and optimised with other benefits in mind. And NTFS compression isn’t well supported in Linux.

This laptop is more than capable of running SNES emulation; its 1GHz quadcore, and 4gb ram.

SNES is an old system which had 3.58Mhz CPU and 128kb ram; you’ll be able to emulate it without much issue on that laptop. BSNES has low requirements (like an Athlon or Pentium 4, and 512mb ram, and Open GL2), although if you have problems then Snes9x and ZSnes are less accurate but lighter weight. RetroArch is pretty convenient way to deploy emulators and has BSNES, Snes9x and Snex9x_Next cores to use.

A lightweight Desktop Environement may help make the laptop feel snappier; Xfce or Lxqt. If it feels slow then you want a minimal desktop which doesn’t have overhead like compositing. Also don’t use flatpaks especially if you multitask; use native apps as flatpaks have some overhead.

Mint as a distro is fine for installing lightweight desktop environments, and if you wanted you could install Linux Mint Xfce edition from scratch.

Few options off the top of my head:

• Open a terminal (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+T) and type “firefox -p &”. The & operator runs the process in the background so it will continue to run even when the terminal is closed

OR

• Use your desktops equivalent to windows “run”. So for example, on KDE use Krunner (Alt+F2 or Alt+Space usually launches it) and type in “firefox -p”; it usually defaults to running a command. There is also a dedicated “Run Command” plasmoid that can be added to your desktop. On Gnome, I think the “run a command” dialogue will do the same (also Alt+F2 I believe).

OR

• Add an app entry to your desktops menu for Firefox Profile Manager. On KDE if you type Profile, “Profile Manager - Firefox” already exists as a Krunner action; so you can easily get it from your menu or krunner just typing Profile. If it doesn’t exist then you can use your desktop’s menu editor to copy the firefox entry and add the -p as the command line argument. On KDE that done most easily by right clicking on the menu icon and selecting “edit applications…” or search for menu editor. Other desktops will be very similar.