Switched To Linux

I haven't used it since the 90's but after reading through this thread I'm tempted to give this a try.

Which distro will run the smoothest/fastest on limited spec hardware? Only needed for browsing/office type stuff.
 
MartinPrince said:
I haven't used it since the 90's but after reading through this thread I'm tempted to give this a try.

Which distro will run the smoothest/fastest on limited spec hardware? Only needed for browsing/office type stuff.
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Define 'limited spec'? For Linux, anything from the last 10 or so years will run fine. Older than that, I'd start to look at a lighter distro. I'm typing this reply in Fedora 30 Gnome (not the lightest environment) on a 7 year old base model MacBook Pro (dual core 2.5GHz i5) and it flies along. If it really is an old CPU or low on RAM then try Lubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the light LxQT environment.
 
Rainmaker said:
Define 'limited spec'? For Linux, anything from the last 10 or so years will run fine. Older than that, I'd start to look at a lighter distro. I'm typing this reply in Fedora 30 Gnome (not the lightest environment) on a 7 year old base model MacBook Pro (dual core 2.5GHz i5) and it flies along. If it really is an old CPU or low on RAM then try Lubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the light LxQT environment.
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I would like to try it on a Netbook and an old Dell laptop.

The Netbook has 2Gb RAM:


The Dell has 4Gb RAM and runs from an SSD drive.
 
TBH you'll probably find that runs fine. Just fire up a live USB for whatever takes your fancy (I recommend Pop!_OS, Ubuntu or similar for newbies). I appreciate you have no prior experience to gauge from, but if it feels slow, sluggish to respond or you're waiting on things - even for a second or two - try a lighter version like Lubuntu and re-evaluate. Don't forget running anything from USB, even USB3.1, is going to feel slow compared to 'bare metal' as you're capped by bus and media read/write speeds.
 
Rainmaker said:
TBH you'll probably find that runs fine. Just fire up a live USB for whatever takes your fancy (I recommend Pop!_OS, Ubuntu or similar for newbies). I appreciate you have no prior experience to gauge from, but if it feels slow, sluggish to respond or you're waiting on things - even for a second or two - try a lighter version like Lubuntu and re-evaluate. Don't forget running anything from USB, even USB3.1, is going to feel slow compared to 'bare metal' as you're capped by bus and media read/write speeds.
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Many thanks for the advice, I'll give them a try and report back.
 
So I've been using Pop! and to be honest I'm struggling with things. I have files on two hard drives that I'm trying to get applications to point to.

To start with, is it possible to put the drives that appear under 'Other Locations' in the file explorer in order? SDC2 is the C drive when I boot into Windows, SDD2 is my D drive and SDA1 is my E drive but they way they are listed makes it hard to remember which drive is which, particularly the D and E drives as they aren't listed in any particular order it seems and they are both the same size in TB.

On my D and E drive are music files and I have installed a variety of music players from the Pop! store. Some of them will only let me have my music library as the 'Music' folder in 'Home' which is blank. Is there anyway of adding an alias to this folder like you can in Windows? If so how would I point it to my D/Music or E/Music?

There is a music player called Lollypop which I've installed (closest I can find to Musicbee) which does let me browse to 'Other Locations' to find my music but it doesn't let me browse to the music folder (only the root of the drive) so it pulls through random files I don't want.
 
maj said:
So I've been using Pop! and to be honest I'm struggling with things. I have files on two hard drives that I'm trying to get applications to point to.

To start with, is it possible to put the drives that appear under 'Other Locations' in the file explorer in order? SDC2 is the C drive when I boot into Windows, SDD2 is my D drive and SDA1 is my E drive but they way they are listed makes it hard to remember which drive is which, particularly the D and E drives as they aren't listed in any particular order it seems and they are both the same size in TB.

On my D and E drive are music files and I have installed a variety of music players from the Pop! store. Some of them will only let me have my music library as the 'Music' folder in 'Home' which is blank. Is there anyway of adding an alias to this folder like you can in Windows? If so how would I point it to my D/Music or E/Music?

There is a music player called Lollypop which I've installed (closest I can find to Musicbee) which does let me browse to 'Other Locations' to find my music but it doesn't let me browse to the music folder (only the root of the drive) so it pulls through random files I don't want.
Click to expand...

To quote and answer my own post, I've still been unable to achieve what I'm trying to do. I've since learned that the linux term for what I'm trying to do is a symlink. I create a link to my D or E drive and link it to the Music folder that is in my profile. I thought I had found a working solution by doing the following:

Code: 
sudo fdisk -l

My E drive (on Windows) is mounted as 'sda1'.

Then
Code: 
sudo ln -s '/media/sda1/music/' '/home/myusername/music/e drive music'


Which returns the following error:

ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/myusername/music/e drive music': No such file or directory
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If I try to browse to my media folder in terminal with:

Code: 
cd /media

ls

I see an entry for my username. If I then cd into my username I can then see my E drive listed under some random characters (not sure why my C drive and D drive aren't showing at this point either). If I browse to the Music folder I can see all my music files listed. The full path is:

Code: 
/media/myusername/E692727A92724F55/Music

If I try this instead:

Code: 
sudo ln -s '/media/myusername/E692727A92724F55/Music' '/home/myusername/music/e drive music'

I still get the error about no such file or directory existing.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please? Maybe Linux isn't for me if accessing my Windows drives is going to be troublesome.
 
maj said:
Can anyone point me in the right direction please? Maybe Linux isn't for me if accessing my Windows drives is going to be troublesome.
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Honestly? It's not troublesome you just don't know how to do it yet. How are you getting on mounting your Linux drives in Windows?... If you're going to want to run back to Win10 every time you don't know how to do something, then honestly just give up now. Linux isn't worse (often, it's better) but it *is* different. There's a learning curve and you need to be ready to persevere with that until you have that knowledge, just like when you started out with Windows.

I don't mean this in any kind of nasty or derogatory way, I'm just trying to give you some perspective. As it happens what you want is easy enough. I'm typing this off the top of my head (not in Linux atm) so you may need a few simple tweaks if you hit any issues.

Is the drive NTFS? I'll assume it is. You need to mount it automatically at boot (well you don't 'need' to but it's easier) using fstab and then you can symlink to it if you want.

First unmount the drive, which will be mounted as you said with a random uuid and mount point (eg /dev/sda):

Code: 
sudo umount /path/to/drive

Then

Code: 
sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add:

Code: 
UUID=E692727A92724F55 ntfs-3g /media/name/Music defaults 0 0

Save and exit (CTRL + X followed by Y followed by enter/return). Now mount the drive by clicking on it again (eg in Places in the file manager).

Now you can make the extra symlink if you want (it'll already show up as a drive/place in the sidebar once mounted, so it's up to you if you really need an extra fairly pointless symlink in /home):

Code: 
sudo chown username:username /media/name/Music

Code: 
mkdir '/home/name/e drive music'

Code: 
ln -s /media/name/Music /home/name/music etc etc
 
Rainmaker said:
<snip>
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Thank you. I managed to get this sorted in the end by using your post as as guide and doing the following:

Code: 
sudo fdisk -l

sudo blkid

sudo nano /etc/fstab

mkdir '/home/<name>/d_drive'
mkdir '/home/<name>/e_drive'

ln -s /media/<name>/d_drive/Music /home/<name>/Music/D_Drive
ln -s /media/<name>/e_drive/Music /home/<name>/Music/E_Drive


There may be a few commands missing but this is what I remember doing to get it working. Don't worry about being harsh, I was just frustrated that it didn't seem to be possible to achieve in the file explorer without messing around in terminal. There is an initial learning curve when it comes to learning Linux having used Windows pretty much all my life. Things like having to install to install Gnome Tweaks via terminal so I can add a minimise, and maximise button to Nautilus for example when it is there by default in Windows. I also seem to be the only one who has Linux and Windows on a dual boot on separate drives so tasks I'm trying to achieve might be unique so appreciate any help I go get.

Going back to my code, it works but I had to create two symlinks due to having two music folders on two different drives. I really should get one big drive to store them on which I'm working on. Some of the music player apps will read sub folders of /home/<name>/Music/ but some won't. Not then end of the world but I couldn't see another way of achieving what I was trying to do. Ideally I'd like the two folders to be merged into one and have the content stored in home/<name>/Music as the symlink command seems to create a subfolder so I now have a subfolder called D_Drive and one called E_Drive inside the default Music folder.

I've learned something new out of all of this which I can hopefully put to good use for other tasks so thanks again.
 
It's easy to say I know but don't get too frustrated about using the terminal. It is sometimes the best way to get things done and if you are anything like me you will grow to prefer it over the gui for a lot of things. The additional feedback you get from using a terminal command can be invaluable and allows you to see what's going on "under the hood".
 
I've had a machine running fedora for a good few years now and I am still a total linux noob tbh.

It took me a good few hours yesterday to move some partitions about.

Linux can be very frustrating imho but the rewards in knowing that there's no telemetry or other invasive stuff happening more than compensates for that.
 
Steveocee said:
Just stick pop on my work laptop. Feels so much better than Ubuntu. My only issue we fixed by turning off the hidpi daemon.

Love the full drive encryption as standard.
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Surely there is a performance hit there though. Do you really need that feature?

I'm getting more and more tempted to flip to PopOS now. Going to run it in a VM to see if I can get my desktop looking the same as now.
 
They have done a good job with Fedora 30. However two things that cheese me off a little is:

1. There is no minimise on Firefox!!! All other apps have a right click minimise option. So why have they left it out for Firefox?!
2. You can't copy and paste from/to the terminal. You have to use cntrl-shift-c and cntrl-shift-v.

Why spoil a fantastic release with these two little oversights. :confused:
 
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opethdisciple said:
They have done a good job with Fedora 30. However two things that cheese me off a little is:

1. There is no minimise on Firefox!!! All other apps have a right click minimise option. So why have they left it out for Firefox?!
2. You can't copy and paste from/to the terminal. You have to use cntrl-shift-c and cntrl-shift-v.

Why spoil a fantastic release with these two little oversights. :confused:
Click to expand...

I can do both of those,are you fully updated?
 
Steveocee said:
There is a bit of a hit but for the bulk of the laptops usage it "was" just browser based activities so read/write really wasn't that much of a problem.
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Fair enough - I'm doing quite a bit of vmware stuff so it's not really practical for me. I might have to look at making a separate encrypted partition for anything sensitive though. :)
 
APM said:
I can do both of those,are you fully updated?
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Yes.

When I right click on Firefox there is no minimise. And I cannot copy paste to the terminal using the mouse.

How are you doing it?

The only modification I've made to it is installing the rpmfusion repo and installing ffmpeg-libs to enable HTML5 in Firefox. But that worked perfectly in Fedora 30. So I doubt it's related.

I suppose I could try a reinstall if I have to.

----

Right spun up a VM at work with Fedora workstation 30 on it. And it is exactly the same as mine at home. There is no right click minimize for Firefox.

However there does seem to be copy/paste from to the terminal!
 
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