BananaTrifleViolin

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.

I’ve not had this issue around batteries? Is there specific hardware you can give as an example? For me laptop batteries last longer and I’ve replaced Windows on a random laptop, not researched anything hardware wise.

Note, Windows has a “trick” of defaulting to “balanced” mode on Laptop installs (even when plugged in I’ve found), which basically means your hardware is throttled unless you turn it off but this trick does make the battery seem to last for ages. You’re actually not using the rest of your hardware at full potential in this situation. Many users seem to be unaware of their power profile setting in Windows. Meanwhile, in my experience Linux installs tends to default to a performance power profile unless you specifically change it yourself (for example balanced or battery saver while unplugged etc) but again this may depend on your distro’s default settings.

In KDE the power profiles are in the Settings > Power Management section and in the task tray. Same will exist on Gnome, and I know it exists on XFCE as I’ve used it’s power profiles before too.

Thanks for sharing this! This was new to me but makes modding Steam games so much easier.

A little more difficult for GOG games but not much; definitely much better than the manual approach.

Data has value and this data is particularly valuable to Valve and its competitors. So Valve share the raw data which has gross numbers but they don’t share the useful data. The useful data is the processed data - the corrected and weighted data based on the other information Valve has about its users and install base. That way can weight this months survey responses to expected proportions of the whole user base and see actual user wide figures and trends.

What Valve shares is akin to a polling company sharing the raw data from the people who completed a polling survey. It’s relatively meaningless and even misleading until they correct the data to weight it to make it representative of the whole population.

So this month there were 1.15% fewer linux users in the survey pool, not 1.15% fewer linux users overall. They will correct the data to see an actual proportion of Linux users. For example: they have data on every use of Proton and every install of Linux versions of software; and how many times each user installs a game (occasional vs heavy users). They don’t share that but they can use that to help correct the data and get much more accurate picture - one they don’t share as it gives them a commercial advantage.

I prefer XFCE for lightweight uses (e.g. VM or raspberry Pi) and KDE for normal desktop use.

For me MATE isn’t quite light enough for lightweight when XFCE is there, and no where near attractive or pleasant enough for day-to-day use when RAM/CPU use isn’t a bottleneck. KDE is certainly more resource intense but up to 1gb of RAM and 1-3% CPU idle for a full featured, slick desktop environment is worth it.

I don’t really see the appeal of MATE unless you strongly want a GNOME 2 desktop. In which case, yes it makes sense. Although ironically you can make a very close but modern take on GNOME 2 with KDE with modern bells and whistles if you’re willing to customise KDE - it’s that flexible.

So I started by dual booting; it’s not a bad way of doing things although Windows likes to mess with bootloaders.

Optimal way is have physically separate hard drives/NVME cards, Windows on one, Linux on the other. The Linux bootloader should detect windows and point to it’s bootloader as a menu option without issue.

Make Linux the default OS and only switch to Windows when you really have to. I haven’t used my Windows install in like 1 year? I kept it for gaming but everything I want works in Linux. I even have a Windows VM in Linux for using Office if I need to for work (used it a few times in a year and beat having to restart into windows)

I’d wipe the windows drive but I just can’t be bothered right now.

I recommend a KDE distro to start as it’s very flexible - it can mimic windows and also be wildly different if you want. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but I’d recommend OpenSUSE Leap as a stabler point release distro when starting out. I know longer recommend Mint as I find Cinnamon tired and there is so much old and bad advice on tweaking or fixing issues on Mint that it is actually potentially detrimental to being secure and safe.

Yes, Krohnkite on KDE auto-resizes window tiles and keeps the screen full. It’s a default setting (monocular view) but can also be turned off.

To use krohnkite you can add it from within KDE - go to Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts. Then top right select “Get New…” and type K in the search box and it’ll be one of the top options.

It works well but you may need to log out and and back in after enabling it to see some of the changes. Also you will probably want to change other KDE panels and layouts to fit how you want to use the desktop in a tiling set up (and there are plenty of widgets available and window animations to add - like Geometry - if you want to a specific tiling set up and look).

KDE is incredibly customisable, but for tiling it may take a little work to get it exactly where you want it. Also worth backing up your settings folders once you’ve got it how you want it (Konsave for example, or manually)

The DE is very important to me, and for me that is KDE. Tbh I find Gnome horrendous to use - too locked down, too uncompromising in it’s design. If you like the paradigm then I imagine it’s decent - certainly looks very slick. KDE on the other hand is very flexible and has been easy to tune it to exactly what I want.

But i’d say switching DE shouldn’t be a “barrier”. Almost all distros support multiple DEs, and Gnome or KDE is a common choice.

When is comes to VR, you can set up an alternate X11 session which only runs Steam in gamescope mode, with minimal or no desktop environment. /usr/share/xsessions/ contains defined X11 sessions; you can manually add one that literally only launches one program via a .desktop file pointing to a script (e.g. launches steam in gamescope mode with a specified resolution). Or you can install a very minimal DE such as OpenBox or i3 and set that up to autolaunch Steam in a window or big picture/gamescope mode. This way whenever you want to VR, you log out of your Gnome desktop session and then login to your “Steam” session, and almost all resources are available for Steam and games with minimal overhead. The minimal DE route is probably the better route just because of options to get out of crashes and problem solve. Either way, this route bypasses the Gnome / and general Wayland issues with VR.

You don’t need to do anything, it’ll work without Windows, and grub should auto update with your distro when you do a major update (such as Kernel update)

You might want to manually update grub to remove the Windows entry just to keep it tidy. On mint it’s as simple as:

sudo update-grub

It’ll scan your installed kernels and other OS. If windows is gone, it will no longer be detected and disappear from the boot list after running this.

If you’ve set up a default OS at boot (like Windows) you might want to update the grub config files. Thats as simple as editing /etc/default/grub and setting:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0

Where 0 is the first boot entry.

You can also use:

GRUB_DEFAULT=“saved”

which will remember the last selected item and boot that. Bit redundant if you’re going down to 1 OS.

During the OpenSuSE install you can choose custom package collections (or packages). So you can install any of the DEs available and multiple DEs if you want. You can deselect the default DE and chose something else entirely.

It’s not put front and centre as an option like CachyOS seems to be doing but is easily accessed in a submenu.

So on my linux PC, I have made a KVM (Kernal Virtual Machine) using QEMU and made a Windows 11 machine inside it (and I bought a digital license for it), which I have work office and email set up. I personally only need to use it occasionally. If you give it enough resources it works decently & runs all windows software; although as it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card it won’t look as slick as native windows 11 machine and run GPU intense software well (you can get it it’s own dedicated video card and pass it through but really isn’t worth it for just using Excel). It means I can main linux but use Windows occasionally if I really have to. It means you can have a full Windows machine with work Microsoft account set up for Office, One Drive etc - depending on your employers policies of course. You can cut down the resources you allocate it if you want to be switching between the Windows machine and other software in Linux, but Windows can be laggy without enough resources as it’s so poorly optimised.

There are sites that guide on setting up a windows 11 machine in linux, but essentially you need to install KVM modules and Virtual Machine manager in linux (available on all distros). You do need to access your PCs bios to ensure the settings that allow virtual machines to access the CPU are on (slightly different name between AMD and Intel CPUs).

Then you create a machine in Virtual machine manager, give it plenty of resources (especially if the idea being when you use it if it’s the only think you’ll be doing, give it access to most of your CPU cores and the majority of your RAM), and create a decent size virtual hard drive file (I’d say minimum 128gb or more as Windows is bloaty - you can set the virtual drive file size to be flexible so it has a max size but the actual file size is only what is used by the guest system but some file systems still use the whole space unfortunately; not sure how Windows behaves). Download the Windows 11 installer ISO, and then add that file as a virtual CD drive for your guest machine, boot the guest machine, and you should get the Win 11 installer. The VM can only see the virtual hard drive file, so you can install Win 11 safely onto the drives it sees with no risk to your PC. Then reboot and you should have a new Windows install; test it - if it works, buy a digital license (if you want…) and install Office using your 365 account OR if you have old CDs then pass those through to the virtual machine and install as on any Windows PC.

Yeah it can be confusing; Flatseal makes it easier as it’s a GUI way of doing what is otherwise command line with flatpak itself but it still assumes some knowledge about what you’re doing and can be a bit of trial and error. The more you expose to the sandbox, the more “native” performance you can achieve but it’s at the expense of security.

In Flatseal you can set global options for all apps, or individual apps. For graphics, in the Device section, toggling the option to make the GPU available to the sandboxes may be needed - “GPU Acceleration” in the Device section. That one option can be pretty effective as GPU hardware acceleration is often important, if not essential, for programs like Handbrake (which are video transcoding).

This is equivalent to “device=dri” when launching the flatpak via the commandline.

I’m not aware of general Linux specific tools for this (game specific ones do exist). However:

• Vortex does work on Linux: https://linuxvox.com/blog/vortex-mod-manager-linux/
• So does Curseforge: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-install-curseforge-on-linux/

They both work by you running them in wine and pointing them to the game files created by Steam (or Gog or any windows game installed via Wine or Proton) in the Linux filesystem (e.g. /home/yourname/.steam/steamapps/common/game) instead of windows filesystem (e.g. C:\program files\game)

Modloaders with “bootstrap” fixes will also work; they just have to be installed and run in the same proton/wine prefix as the game. I.e. if you install Cyberpunk 2077 via steam, the bootstrap type mods need to be installed into the game folder or fake-windows file system that Proton makes for the game. It even has it’s own “drive C” folder for the rare times you need 3rd party tools. You also put tools into the game folder as you would on windows. If it has it’s own custom exe you can tell wine/proton to run that instead of the game or even before the game in the same prefix.

I mod games extensively on Linux; they work just as they do in Windows. I’ve played heavily modded Cyperpunk 2077 to completion (all the mod tools work via proton - that takes a little tweaking to get working but is doable - and many mods you just drop into specific sub folders; I played with about 50 mods and I didn’t find a single one that didn’t work on Linux specifically), Stardew Valley, Rimworld and Minecraft for example of bredth. Stardew, Rimworld and Minecraft even have linux specific tools to help.

This is less a case of games run via Linux not being moddable, and more that it has it’s own learning curve (in the same way modding on Windows has a learning curve). Once you understand how the linux filesystem and how proton/wine work, the world is your oyster. Protontricks and Winetricks are not just useful for getting games running or tweaking them, they’re a modders best friend.

Did you set your Mint to autologin to desktop? If so then your Keyring is then locked and you get prompts to unlock it when you want to use anything that needs it - websites, software like email etc. The keyring holds your passwords and credentials to pass to on as needed and keeps your system secure. If you set your desktop to not autologin - i.e. have a login screen - your keyring is unlocked automatically as you log on to the PC and you don’t keep getting prompts to unlock the keyring. You can disable the keyring entirely or give it a blank password, but it’s better to use the login screen to keep your device secure, and let the keyring do it’s thing in the background even though “login automatically” is so easy to tick and use. The wallet is the same concept on KDE desktops.

Otherwise the only password prompts you should get are similar to windows - when you want to make system level changes.

I’d recommend OpenSuSE Leap with KDE. User friendly, stable, with a good GUI for making all system changes. Fedora KDE is also a good popular distro; I’m not sure how good it’s GUI is but I’d be surprised if you need to use the terminal. People often recommend the terminal (because it IS quicker - often one step instead of “go here, click here, click here”) but there is usually a GUI way of doing everything.

The text here on the fediverse is the prologue; bit confusing but click through the link and it makes sense.

Interesting read, thank you. Also I recognise this type of procrastination: sit down to do one thing, end up installing a whole different OS :D

KDE is genuinely incredibly flexible - you can make it into pretty much any GUI that exists. The default windows like set up is fine, but there are so many easy tweaks and changes you can make to get it however you want. I have a floating dock-like set up instead of a window-like taskbar, with application launcher, icon-only view, system tray, clock and power button.

For simple tweaks yoy can right click on most component of your KDE panels and select “Show alternatives…” to see different official versions of the same component. For example, the Application Launcher offers an alternative Application Menu with cascading menus like an old-school windows start menu, or a full screen gnome-like Application Dashboard. And there are also loads more user made tools if you right click and select “Add or Manage widgets”. Every component of the desktop is a widget and can be moved, swapped out, duplicated or replaced.

It’s really not that difficult with a Global Theme; anyone can do it. There are step by step tutorials on line (such as this one from howtogeek) for people who want to do it manually. The benefit of manual is if there is a major KDE update it is more likely to be completely unaffected; very rarely Global Themes can break and need their own updates.

The Mac ones are the 2nd most popular in the Global Theme store and well maintained though.