Use gparted live to shrink/expand partitions

If they are LVM volumes, it would be possible. Otherwise, you can move the directories you want to the new partition and use symbolic links to point to the new places. Then again some things aren’t correctly designed, so they may have problems with symbolic links and YMMV.

I don’t think there really is an easy way to do this. For sure not as easy as reinstalling.

You can move partitions so they are next to each other and then expand. The easiest way Ive found is to boot a love USB distro, since the partitions can’t be mounted when you do it. Open parted and you can resize and move around.

Backup before you do it!

Mint would probably work for you. Some stuff is outdated, but it has flatpak which is a package manager with more up to date apps. If you’re willing to put in the time though, I’d recommend trying some of the more common distros out (Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). You can use a liveusb to test them without installing.

Steam is available anywhere so that’s not a problem.

Discord officially only has a .deb package, so that’s only for Debian based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint). There are other options for almost all distros though - I personally use Webcord

Fl studio might be tricky - supposedly it runs through wine but you might have to do a bit of work. I’ve personally used Reaper and I works great.

As a fellow user in similar situation, i can tell that i had tried dual boot a few times but would just switch to windows when i wanted something done that didn’t work on linux

3 weeks ago i went full Mint install and left windows altogether. This forced me to find solutions to problems that i otherwise would solve by just switching to windows. Dont expect everything to work though. You will need to tweak some things and you may even need to do some things differently than youre used to. But isn’t this why we change in the first place?

Mint is probably the best install and go experience out there.

Adding to what others have said I also think Mint is a great option. But I strongly encourage you to install things via the package manager when available, I find that a lot of times when someone complains that something (that should work) doesn’t work on Linux is because they’re trying to install things manually, i.e. the Windows way (open browser, search for program name, open website, download installer, open installer, follow instructions), that’s almost never the correct way on Linux.

I have had issues with using a NAS over SMB because of some malarky about reverting to SMB 1.0 or something. Dunno; I stopped backing up to my NAS and just use external drives.

Start by checking what windowing system you’re using as its a fundamental part of problem solving. It’s a little confusing how to do this, the top answer in this Stack exchange thread works well.

If you’re running the latest KDE then you’ve almost certainly been moved to Wayland and that will be the source of your problems. Wayland and Nvidia drivers don’t work well together, and KDE have defaulted to Wayland in the latest release. I have had very similar issues to you with the move to wayland and have not been able to fix them - they’re too fundamental and depend on updates to wayland and/or Nvidia drivers.

I know you don’t want a solution but there isn’t one at the moment, so you’d be wasting your time. The solution is to log out, then on the log in screen select Plasma (X11) as your session and log in again.

Personally I have had to abandon KDE as I get a different set of problems in X11. I’m on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed so have little choice inrolling back to the previously functioning version of KDE - I’m using Cinnamon instead and contemplating switching to a different Linux distro, probably OpenSuSE Leap in favour of stability over cutting edge.

Meanwhile I have the latest KDE running on another device with AMD GPU without issue.

In terms of when it’ll be fixed, there is a change being made to Wayland which will effect how it and the Nvidia drivers interact (something called Explicit sync). It’s just been merged into wayland so presumably will appear downstream in the coming next few months in rolling distributions. There have been articles suggesting this is going to fix most problems but personally I think this is a little brave but fingers crossed.

Try switching to different versions of your graphics driver and/or kernel. Nvidia cards get really finicky about the version matchups, especially as they age. Try different combinations of the versions that are available via pacman, and maybe it’ll work. You may need to start keeping an eye on updates to your kernel and graphics driver to see if a new update fixes your issue. Welcome to life with an nvidia card. I bought an nvidia card once in 2013. By 2016 I had to start playing this game on upgrades. At one point, the graphics driver was causing kernel panics until I downgraded both and waited a few months. Very happy with AMD.

Look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for Xorg errors.

Check if OpenGL is okay by running glxinfo (from the package mesa-utils) and checking in the first few lines for “direct rendering: Yes”.

Check if Vulkan is okay by running vulkaninfo (from the package vulkan-tools) and seeing… if it throws errors at you, I guess. There are probably some specific things you could look for but I’m not familiar enough with Vulkan yet.

You could sudo dmesg and read through looking for problems, but there might be a lot of noise to sift through. I’d start by piping it through grep -i nvidia to look for driver-specific stuff.

Might be worth running nvidia-settings and poking around to see if anything seems amiss. Not sure what you’d actually be looking for, but yeah.

Sometimes switching from linux and nvidia to linux-lts and nvidia-lts can help if the problem is in the kernel or driver. Remember to switch both of these at the same time, since drivers need to match the kernel.

You could also try switching from the nvidia drivers to nouveau. Might offer temporary relief and help narrow down where the problem is, at the expense of probably worse performance in heavy games. Ought to be fine for 2D gaming and general desktopping.

Trying a different window manager is always an option. Don’t know how much hassle that is when you use a full DE; I’ve always been the “just grab individual lightweight pieces and slap 'em together” sort so I don’t have any real experience with KDE. But yeah. Find out what the right way to change WM is for your system, then try swapping over to Openbox or something minimal like that and see what happens.

Related to WM/DE, it could be an issue with the compositor maybe. Look up whatever KDE’s compositor is and see if you can turn it off and run a different one?

Wayland vs Xorg is mostly equivalent to a beat up 80’s car compared to a brand new car.

Because the older alternatives are hacky, laggy, buggy, and quite fundamentally insecure. X.Org’s whole architecture is a mess, you practically have to go around the damn thing to work it (GLX). It should’ve been killed in 2005 when desktop compositing was starting to grow, but the FOSS community has a way with not updating standards fast enough.

Hell, that’s kinda the reason OpenGL died a slow death, GL3 had it released properly would’ve changed everything

Because there is only one alternative (Xorg/X11), and it’s pretty outdated and not really maintained anymore.

For now it’s probably still fine, but in a couple of years everything will probably use Wayland.

Wayland has better support for some newer in-demand features, like multiple monitors, very high resolutions, and scaling. It’s also carrying less technical debt around, and has more people actively working on it. However, it still has issues with nvidia video cards, and there are still a few pieces of uncommon software that won’t work with it.

The only alternative is X. Its main advantage over Wayland is network transparency (essentially it can be its own remote client/server system), which is important for some use cases. And it has no particular issues with nvidia. However, it’s essentially in maintenance mode—bugs are patched, but no new features are being added—and the code is old and crufty.

If you want the network transparency, have an nvidia card (for now), or want to use one of the rare pieces of software that doesn’t work with Wayland/XWayland, use X. Otherwise, use whatever your distro provides, which is Wayland for most of the large newbie-friendly distros.

It’s… complicated. Wayland is the heir apparent to Xorg. Xorg is a fork of an older XFree86 which is based on the X11 standard.

X11 goes back… a long time. It’s been both a blessing and a liability at times. The architecture dates back to a time of multi-user systems and thin clients. It also pre-dates GPUs. Xorg has been updating and modernizing it for decades but there’s only so much you can do while maintaining backward compatibility. So the question arose: fix X or create something new? Most of the devs opted for the later, to start from scratch with a replacement.

I think they bit off a bit more than they could chew, and they seemed to think they could push around the likes of nvidia. So it’s been a bumpy road and will likely continue to be a bit bumpy for a bit. But eventually things will move over.

In addition to the other replies, one of the main draws of Wayland is that it’s much less succeptible to screen-tearing / jerky movements that you might sometimes experience on X11 - like when you’re dragging around windows or doing something graphics/video heavy. Wayland just feels much smoother and responsive overall. Other draws include support for modern monitor/GPU features like variable refresh rates, HDR, mixed DPI scaling and so on. And there’s plenty of stuff still in the works along those lines.

Security is another major draw. Under X11, any program can directly record what’s on your screen, capture your clipboard contents, monitor and simulate keyboard input/output - without your permission or knowledge. That’s considered a huge security risk in the modern climate. Wayland on the other hand employs something called “portals”, that act as a middleman and allow the user to explicitly permit applications access to these things. Which has also been a sore point for many users and developers, because the old way of doing these things no longer works, and this broke a lot of apps and workflows. But many apps have since been updated, and many newer apps have been written to work in this new environment. So there’s a bit of growing pains in this area.

In terms of major incompatibilities with Wayland - XFCE is still a work-in-progress but nearly there (should be ready maybe later this year), but some older DE/WMs may never get updated for Wayland (such as OpenBox and Fluxbox). Gnome and KDE work just fine though under Wayland. nVidia’s proprietary drivers are still glitchy/incomplete under Wayland (but AMD AND Intel work fine. Wine/Proton’s Wayland support is a work-in-progress, but works fine under XWayland.

Speaking of which, “XWayland” is kinda like a compatibility layer which can run older applications written for X11. Basically it’s an X11 server that runs inside Wayland, so you can still run your older apps. But there are still certain limitations, like if you’ve got a keyboard macro tool running under XWayland, it’ll only work for other X11 apps and not the rest of your Wayland desktop. So ideally you’d want to use an app which has native Wayland support. And for some apps, you may need to pass on special flags to enable Wayland support (eg: Chrome/Chromium based browsers), otherwise it’ll run under XWayland. So before you make the switch to Wayland, you’ll need to be aware of these potential issues/limitations.

Because you don’t have an in person user group and only interact online where the same person calling all mandrake users fetal alcohol syndrome babies doesn’t turn around and help those exact people figure out their smb.conf or trade sopranos episodes with them at the lan party.

It did take off, just not so much on the Desktop. I think those infights are really just opinions and part of further development. Having choices might be a great part of the overall success.

Linux generally has a higher (perceived?) technical barrier to entry so people who opt to go that route often have strong opinions on exactly what they want from it. Not to mention that technical discussions in general are often centered around decided what the “right” way to do a thing is. That said regardless of how the opinions are stated, options aren’t a bad thing.

Doesn’t feel like that to me. I’ll need to see evidence that that is the main reason. It could be but I just don’t see it.

Linux users are often very passionate about the software they put on their computers, so they tend to argue about it. I think the customization and choices scares off a lot of beginners, I think the main reason is lack of compatibility with Windows software out of the box. People generally want to use software they are used to.

There’s no infighting. It just feels that way because you picked an inferior distribution.

Back in my slackware days I’d just convert other distros packages to the tgz format or compile the package and its requirements.

If the dependencies were really complex I’d draw a picture to help me understand them better.

As an Arch user (btw), that’s rarely an issue thanks to the AUR and it’s vast package pool :) But on the very rare occasion that it’s not there on the AUR but available as a deb, I can use a tool called Debtap to convert the .deb to the Arch’s .tar.zst package.

For rpm-based distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE etc, there’s a similar tool called alien that can convert the .deb to .rpm.

In both instances though, dependencies can be a pain, sometimes you may need to trawl thru the dependencies and convert/install them, before to do the main package.

Ideally though, you’d just compile from source. It used to be a daunting task in the old days, but with modern CPUs and build systems like meson, it’s not really a big deal these days. You’d just follow the build instructions on the package’s git repo, and usually it’s just a simple copy-paste job.

Finally, if these packages are just regular apps (and not system-level packages like themes etc), then there are multiple options these days such as using containers like Distrobox, or installing a Flatpak/Appimage version of that app, if available.

I typically search the package name + fedora, it will probably tell me the alternative package that is in fedora.

Nowadays, I have moved to an atomic fedora distro, so I would severely limit the amount of package I install on my system for stability and security.

I think I only have two packages installed on my machine: fish, because it is the only popular shell that follows xdg dir; and a latex input method to use in slack.

You can’t. Apple’s iPads and iPhones are e-waste from the moment they run out of security and OS updates. Apple doesn’t allow third party installations.

It’s technically possible, but there aren’t any proper instructions, I assume it’s pretty complicated and you could break the device while doing this. Also, I don’t think it would run particularly well, since there are no Linux drivers for Apple’s proprietary hardware (except for M1 because it was reverse-engineered, but iPads use A-Series chips)

I don’t think that’s possible.

Awk is a programming language designed for reading files line by line. It finds lines by a pattern and then runs an action on that line if the pattern matches. You can easily write a 1-line program on the command line and ask Awk to run that 1-line program on a file. Here is a program to count the number of “comment” lines in a script:

awk 'BEGIN{comment_count=0;} /^[[:space:]]*[#]/{comment_count++;} END{print(comment_count);}' file.sh

It is a good way to inspect the content of files, espcially log files or CSV files. But Awk can do some fairly complex file editing operations as well, like collating multiple files. It is a complete programming language.

Sed works similar to Awk, but it is much simplified, and designed mostly around CLI usage. The pattern language is similar to Awk, but the commands are usually just one or two letters representing actions like “print the line” or “copy the line to the in-memory buffer” or “dump the in-memory buffer to output.”

Probably a bit narro2, but my usecases:

• awk: modify STDIN before it goes to STDOUT. Example: only print the 3rd word for each line
• sed: run a regex on every line.

This is 80% of my usage of awk and sed:

“ugh, I need the 4th column of this print out”: command | awk '{print $4}'

Useful for getting pids out of a ps command you applied a bunch of greps to.

”hm, if I change all ‘this’ to ‘that’ in the print out, I get what I want": command | sed "s/this/that/g"

Useful for a lot of things, like “I need to change the urls in this to that” or whatever.

Basically the rest I have to look up.

Awk lets you do operations based on patterns. You can make little scripts and mini programs with it.

Sed lets you edit streams.

Almost everything can be treated like a stream so with those two tools you have the power to do damn near everything ever.

There’s a book called sed & awk that’s real good.

If you’re gonna dive into sed and awk, I’d also highly recommend learning at least the basics of regular expressions. The book Mastering Regular Expressions has been tremendously helpful for me.

Edit: a letter. Stupid autocorrect.

timeshift is pretty good, but bootable btrfs snapshots are even better

Install everything from store, and you should be fine. If you see a tutorial being too complicated, it is probably not worth following. Set your search engine to past year and see if there are better tutorials.

You might also want to consider atomic distros, they are much harder to mess up, and much easier to restore.

I ran Linux in a vm and destroyed it about… 5 times. It allowed me to really get in and try everything. Once I rana command that removed everything, and I remember watching icons disappear as the destruction unfolded in front of me. It was kind of fun.

I have everything backed up and synced so it’s all fine. Just lots of reinstalling Thunderbird, Firefox, re logging into firefox sync, etc.

Once I stopped destroying everything I did a proper install and haven’t looked back.

This will be my 7th year on Linux now. And I have to say, it feels good to be free.

Another perspective: Your question implies you want to try out things with Debian. If this assumption is correct, I would highly recommend you just create a virtual machine with qemu/libvirt and learn within this environments/try out things there before doing stuff ‘on the metal’.

Of course backups are always a good idea and once you got your feed wet you might want to learn about ‘Infrastructure as code’. Have fun!

You want a disk imager like clonezilla or something. If you’re not ready for that just show hidden files and copy your /home/your_username directory to a usb or something. That’s where all your files live.

The rtl 8125 works

By default waydroid uses an x86 android image. Most games are not build for x86.

I have followed this to run an arm android image. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid#ARM_Apps_Incompatible

With that, I was able to install all apps.

Waydroid works, but there’s three main things you need to get things going to replicate a typical Android device:

• OpenGapps: For GApps/Play Store. You’ll also need to register your device to get an Android ID.
• Magisk: Mainly to pass SafetyNet / Play Integrity basic checks.
• libndk / libhoudini: For ARM > x86 translation. libndk works better on AMD.
• Widevine: (optional) L3 DRM for things that need it, eg Netflix

There are some automated scripts that can set this all up. I used this one in the past with some success.

Also, stay away from nVidia. From what I recall, it just doesn’t work, or there are other issues like crashes. But if you’re serious about Linux in general, then ditching nVidia is generally a good idea.

Finally, games that use anti-cheat can be a hit-or-miss (like Genshin Impact, which crashed when I last tried it). But that’s something that you may face on any emulator, I mean, any decent anti-cheat system would detect the usage of emulators.

Try Android Studio

it’s faster for me to type out cp -r source/directory destination/directory than it is to open a file manager, navigate to my source, ctrl-a ctrl-c navigate to my destination, ctrl-v. this is not always true. look at the work done by the plan9 people to learn more

idk what hyprland is specifically, but it’s either a window manager or compositor or something for use with wayland.

wayland and xorg are ways to do graphical user interfaces in unix systems. wayland is supposed to fix problems that have long been solved or worked around in xorg. it’s new and doesn’t workor support everything. xorg is old and has problems but it works very well.

hyprland

A wayland compositor and tiling window manager. The lead developer of the project is a Polish transphobic workaholic.

why do ppl use the CLI for things like making and moving files? i find the GUI easier and faster as well as less prone to mistakes

If you understand how shell scripting works you can easily automate menial tasks. CLI is also an interface shared by all operating systems so if you know how to work around in a shell you’re not bound to any particular workflow/desktop GUI. Keep using GUIs though, they exist for a reason.

what is wayland and xorg, and why does everyone argue about them

Both are display protocols that are in charge of displaying graphics to your screen. Xorg is over 30 years old while wayland is only about 15 years old. The polemic about xorg was that the codebase was unmanageable and the design architecture of the program was inherently flawed (example: screenlocker getting access to your entire screen including apps and desktop, making writing malware for x11 a 3 line python script). X11 was designed during a time when people were using actual real life terminals and mainframes. Wayland is much more modern and akin to how modern graphics APIs are handled (for the most part)

Wayland at its core has and always will be design by committee so a lot of the arguing is necessary (though sometimes long-winded) to make sure to not repeat xorg’s mistakes. Protocols take months if not years to be merged into wayland and those protocols have to be implemented by wayland compositors themselves rather than sharing 1 program altogether like with xorg.

Watch this video for more information, explains it much better and is from an actual wayland board member.

Why YOU should write a Wayland compositor – Victoria Brekenfeld – HiP22 Berlin

Hyperland. Don’t know. Apparently reading someone else’s comment, it has to do with Wayland.

Which leads to answering out of order about Wayland and Xorg. Both are windowing systems, major components of the GUI/desktop environment. Xorg, aka X or X11, is older than Linux; it dates back to the early 80’s. It just wasn’t designed to handle things like multiple monitors with variable refresh rate and all the wacky stuff we have now. It’s amazing it’s hung on this long but the sober fact is X is old and busted.

Wayland is the new hotness meant to replace Xorg. It works a bit different, some old software won’t work with it so there have to be converters, and there’s some issues with Nvidia compatibility with Wayland. There are very few people who just want to stubbornly stay with X, but Wayland still doesn’t work well for their use case, which is why there is much discussion about it.

I use the CLI for things like making and moving files for a lot of reasons.

• I’m interacting with another machine through SSH
• I’m maintaining a server that has no GUI installed
• I’m doing something kind of weird like using scp to send a file from one computer to another via an SSH tunnel
• I’m working on a large batch of files.
• I’m doing something complex or multi-part to a bunch of files.

For example, when I ripped my DVD collection, I had an issue where the software generated file names like S4D2E3.mp4, or Season 4 Disc 2 Episode 3. I was able to copy-paste a list of the episode names of an entire season into a text file, and then using the CLI I iterated through the lines of that file renaming each video file and moved it to the correct storage directory. Saved a lot of manual F2ing.

Of course, I didn’t type those lines of bash each time, I saved it as a script and then ran that each time.

Learn a little bit of regex, how to use vim, how pipes work, and a bit about stuff like imagemagick or pandoc or ffmpeg and you’ll see why Bash is so handy.

The CLI has many advantages over a gui. For one, actions are reific, repeatable, and scriptable. This saves time as you can reuse previous commands and edit them appropriately for the current situation. This makes it easy to look back and verify what you have done. The command line is also a much more stable interface. GUIs change all the time and it’s hard to remember where things might be located. The structure of a Unix system from the command line facilitates the discovery of installed commands/programs and documentation. You can record these actions once and repeat them on many machines. You can script common activities (eg bulk file renaming) that make file and data management easier.

Xorg is a display server for Linux ecosystem. Every ecosystem has a display server. It is what makes it possible for you to have graphical applications with movable windows that can talk to each other, or have a mouse cursor that can click on things.

Wayland is a replacement for Xorg because Xorg is old and its developers said an alternative is needed. Wayland has differences that I won’t discuss here, but I’ll be happy to do so if you ask.

Hyprland is a wayland compositor. A compositor is basically an implementation of wayland (there are many) and gives you a windowing system that you can run graphical applications through. It is usually a lot more minimal than having a full graphical desktop like KDE or Gnome.

Hyprland belongs to a class of comositors called “tiling”, which forces windows to be in a tiling formation. In other words, windows do not overlap or stack on top of each other. Hyprland stands out in having a lot of eye candy and visual effects.

I use CLI for moving files, etc. After you use it for a while, you find out it can be more efficient, faster, and more pleasant to work with.

Albeit not completely beginner friendly, the arch wiki explains btrfs features and manual configuration pretty well. If you are looking for a guide to a snapshot tool, then it depends on your distro, but they probably have an article for it as well (also, check the “related articles” section at the top of the page).

Great question!

EndeavourOS has a great little wiki of tutorials around BTRFS and setting up snapshots, that’s a lot more friendly than just reading wiki manuals.

Here’s a link to the one about getting snapshots and rollbacks set up.

https://discovery.endeavouros.com/encrypted-installation/btrfs-with-timeshift-snapshots-on-the-grub-menu/2022/02/

Alternatively, I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my main production rig and it uses BTRFS and sets up snapshots from the GRUB menu for you by default!

I’m also using Nvidia, so while it’s gotten better and I haven’t had to roll back in a long time, Snapper has saved my butt once or twice in the past. ;)

Just install your system on btrfs and figure the rest out later

If you try a distro that does it by default then it is no more complicated then ext4 for the user. The distro will setup things for you. I know that opens use Tumbleweed and Fedora Workstation set this up by default. Manually configuring is how ever a bit more complicated.