Hey everyone! I’m finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it’s on.

It’s being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.

I’m currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.

I don’t mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don’t want to have to go in and update it every week… I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.

I’d likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.

A few hardware specs:

MSI mobo (I’ve learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml’s for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren’t crucial if lost.

I’ve kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.

I’ve heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I’m not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc…).

I don’t want an upkeep heavy OS. I’m moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that’s come with it.

So… What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?

Thanks!

Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I’ve dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI… So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol

  • ridethisbike@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    I’ve seen Debian mentioned a couple times now. Is there an ideal fork/repo/tell-me-what-word-to-use-here for what I’m trying to do?

    I do have a laptop that would likely work for testing… But other than just firing it up… I have no idea what I should be doing to test it out. Install steam? Docker + a container? I don’t really have the time to commit to doing all of that for multiple distros…

    All the containers will be dockerized. I’ll have to learn the new file structure and change the compose yaml’s before I fire them all up, but I can’t imagine that’ll be too horrible.

    I actually really enjoyed learning docker, but it was a huge time sink and I’m trying to mitigate that as much as I can with this migration

    • NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      No forks for Debian. Actually Debian is often used as a fork so Debian is the original, in a sense. A lot of other distros like Ubuntu have built themselves on Debian over the years. That somewhat speaks volumes to its longevity in the space and how stable it is.

      The download I used is the one on their main page https://www.debian.org/ when you find the Download link in the center of the page. But if you’d like to see all of their options, you should take a look at this page https://www.debian.org/distrib/ but really it’s kind of the generic download for most, unless you need the ARM version because you’re installing on something like a Raspberry Pi or if you are using Azure, then they have a build for a virtual machine in the cloud.

      Once you download the ISO from them, whether it be from a mirror or a torrent, you’ll use something like Rufus to create your live USB and that’ll let you try it out and then actually do the install. When in this live USB, you can do anything you want in it to test it and see how you like it. You can even install apps and such but just know that on next reboot, the live USB goes back to default, so it’s kind of like a computer that you can keep using indefinitely as a fresh install. It’s meant to do that so you can test it and ensure it’s what you want and works well with your system, because if that doesn’t load, then you won’t be able to install it at all. You basically get to run the entire OS off a USB flash drive and then there’s an option to actually install the OS to your computer if you feel ready to do so. Most distros go this route which is honestly a really great feature of Linux. That live USB is also good to hold onto in case anything should happen. For one, you have something that will let you run Linux off a USB in case you have like a hard drive failure and need to troubleshoot or if you ever need to reinstall Linux, you’ll have that ready to go again for you. The installation process for most distros nowadays is super simple and walks you through the entire process. It’s as easy as installing windows, and in my opinion, it’s easier and faster than installing Windows for most distros. Another good thing about Debian here is that it’s really basic and barebones. Bazzite will give you a bunch of programs right off the bat, but Debian is a pretty clean slate you’ll be working with so you don’t have a bunch of programs installed and possibly running that you’ll never use but not sure if you can remove them or not.

      As far as installing stuff, you can generally do just like Windows and go to your choice program’s webpages and most will either have .deb files you can manually download and run to install your application (like Steam) or you can use the terminal’s apt (what Debian uses, other distros like Arch and Fedora may use something different) to search for and install packages too.

      Personally I prefer using apt in the terminal to install my apps. It makes it much more clean and easy to manage for updates. So for searching you’ll want to use “apt search Steam” for Steam, for example. And you’ll get a list of results in the terminal results to choose from. When you find the one you feel is the one you want to use, you’ll then run “sudo apt install Steam” and if it finds duplicates it’ll prompt you which be you want or it’ll just ask you if you want to proceed or not and you enter a y or n for yes or no and the terminal takes care of the installation for you.

      I generally find the app I want from the list of apt search and then copy the name exactly as shown in the list and paste when doing “sudo apt install Steam” where Steam is whatever was shown in the search results.

      Sudo being the equivalent of entering your administrator credentials to do an elevated task like on Windows. Sudo isn’t needed when searching for an app name, hence why you don’t need sudo there, but sudo is required to actually install the app and its updates. You can use sudo with apt search, but it’s not necessary and might be a security risk to get used to using sudo when not necessary. So best to only use sudo when you know you need to. If an action requires it, either the app will directly tell you to run sudo or will tell you that access has been denied and that’s your tell tale sign that you need to use sudo before the command and run again.

      When you want to update, you’ll run “sudo apt update” and the checks to see if you have updates available. If updates are available, it’ll generally say something like “5 updates found, run apt upgrade to perform upgrades” and you’ll then run “sudo apt upgrade” to actually perform the upgrades. This is pretty automated and it runs through everything for you after you do these. So any apps you have installed using apt will get their updates through this. Because of this, I generally will run through this once a week and see what needs updating. “Sudo apt update” and then “sudo apt upgrade”. Rarely will you run into errors but when you do, you’ll usually have clear wording in the terminal to tell you exactly why it failed or something you can put in Google to diagnose or share with a space like here to get help from others. Others may frown on me for saying this, but I’ve gotten a lot of help from LLMs with this stuff too. Granted you have to know some of it beforehand to know when the LLM is giving you good, helpful information and not something incorrect, but it’s been a help for me, personally, when troubleshooting arises.

      If you make a mistake and install the wrong app or change your mind and no longer want it, uninstallation is as easy as “sudo apt remove steam” and following the prompts thereafter.

      Some may recommend you do stuff like “sudo apt install steam -y” where the -y flag is to tell the command “if prompted for y or n, enter y” so you really automate the process for yourself. But I honestly don’t recommend that for people new to Linux because it’s better to know what you’re doing and read the prompts in the terminal and when you feel confident, then try some of those flags like that. It is one of the bad things about LLMs, because a lot of them will give you commands like that to run and it’s honestly better to not use flags until you’re sure of what you’re doing and what you want.

      Honestly, if you’re familiar with docker containers and yaml files, it’s pretty much the same on Linux.

      I manage my docker directly from the terminal. You’ll want to first install docker using “apt search docker” and then using commands to build my yaml and then compose within docker. But you can also use a variety of programs available to manage docker in a GUI, which is an app that has a graphical interface much like what most apps on Windows do if you’re more comfortable going that route.

      Since you’ve already been using it and got some yamls made, you might be able to just directly transfer them over into your Linux build, whichever distro you end up going with and once you get docker installed and set up.