Switching from Windows to Linux: Sharing My Experience and Lessons Learned

Changed the title as this thread has grown arms and legs.

Firmware is installed and the system can see two ports but none of them works as a line in.

Pulse Audio, which I installed hoping it would help, turned out to be the cause of the slow recording speed. It seams it causes a conflict with ALSA.

I have tried to get Pipewire working but I cannot get the pipewire.service running. I am told the service does not exist even when I can see the config file in the correct place. I have uninstalled it and re-installed it without success.

Also, I managed to kill Gnome desktop somehow with my experiments. I was remoting in via windows, when I remotely restarted the Linux machine I was presented with a tty command line prompt on the Linux machine :-( fortunately I was able to run tasksel from the tty1 line to get it back, and most of my programmes appear to be intact.

Is there a command I could have typed to relaunch GDM? I tried startx but that did not work.

I must remember to run timeshift more often as I thought I was going to lose a couple of hours work.

edit
Appears I should have used "sudo systemctl restart gdm3" never mind I will note that down for future mishaps lol
 
Last edited:
Setting up SteamVR for Linux went surprisingly well albeit still in Beta and was presented with the default launcher VR room after installing . Tried a couple of VR programmes, but couldn't get them to launch which is expected for experimental software. I need to read up on the Steam forums.

Apparently Gnome 3 is not compatible with SteamVR, so I had to switch to Gnome Classic to get it to work with VR games.

Did have a minor hick up, as steam was reporting some missing files at start up. I found a fix by executing the following

sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/getcap /usr/bin/getcap
sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/setcap /usr/bin/setcap

I am not sure what it does but it worked :-)
 
Last edited:
Reading this thread is really interesting, and as a learning experience in the ways of Debian (and so therefore all the spins that come off it) I can see it being really good for the OP.

But Linux these days doesn't have to be like that or hard if you don't want it to be. If I were reading it as a beginner with a casual interest in installing Linux i'm not sure what i'd take away from it positively. Not everyone is quite so driven to learn (or commited timewise enough (props to the OP)) to go in at the deep end and may still want to try Linux to move away from Windows and want to game/do general computing tasks with minimal fuss but still learning something new on the way.

If I were them i'd looking at installing Bazzite (OK it's based on Fedora and rolling, but is immutable, so even if you do break it you can rollback with a click or two, and is configured for gaming on Steam/GOG/Epic from the get-go) or the usual Debian/Ubuntu based tropes of Mint or Pop!_os which would require a little configuration and aren't so out of the box configured (read more painful to configure if you are coming from Windows) and are more general purpose. But all of which would present me with a working system and a nice fuzzy feeling of achieving something and a base from which I could learn from at my leisure with lots of resources available to aid me.

I recently installed Bazzite to try on an external NvME, I was up and gaming in half an hour. I didn't touch the console once. I'd happily load Bazzite for my 80 year old mum to use and trust it not to break any more than she breaks Windows already.

Just my penneth. :)
 
Last edited:
It's a good penneth and I agree.

There are quite a few distros that give a great out-of-the-box experience, with separate versions for AMD and Nvidia graphics, and lots of options for setting up gaming and some of the more common requirements at install time. Even Arch has a very good installer these days.

Debian has chosen not to hand-hold to that extent so can be more difficult to set up but I would never discourage anyone from giving it a go. Especially as Debian is relatively easy to learn IMO and is the basis for quite a few other popular distros, as you say. The OPs attitude to learning is commendable and will stand him in good stead if he sticks at it.
 
Buffalo2102 said:
Debian has chosen not to hand-hold to that extent so can be more difficult to set up but I would never discourage anyone from giving it a go. Especially as Debian is relatively easy to learn IMO and is the basis for quite a few other popular distros, as you say. The OPs attitude to learning is commendable and will stand him in good stead if he sticks at it.
Click to expand...
Absolutely, I started out on SunOS in the previous millennia and what I learnt then is still relevant and applicable now in a lots of aspects (some of it I even remember occasionally ;)).

One of the things I was trying to get across in my previous post was all those distros go some way to reduce frustration and therefore the risk of the user bouncing off them (and indeed Linux as whole) and thinking "this isn't for me". For instance, adding a desktop shortcut to Gnome is a travail if you don't know how to use extensions, whereas it is trivial under Windows, a silly example, but one nonetheless.
 
Mercurial said:
But Linux these days doesn't have to be like that or hard if you don't want it to be. If I were reading it as a beginner with a casual interest in installing Linux i'm not sure what i'd take away from it positively.....
Click to expand...


Total potential beginner that has not even started and maybe far too complacent, and familiar with Windows to even bother.

Attracted to the thread with the title......

Just reinforced my complacency with more than a touch of conviction that I'm right, lol.!
 
I am open to suggestions as what to call this thread. I am not strictly a beginner when it comes to Linux. I have dabbled with Ubuntu in the past in VM's over the years but never to completely switch from Windows like I am doing now.

edit: Updated thread title again, I agree it was a bit misleading since I never meant it to be a promotion of the idea that configuring Linux was easy, better, or that Debian was the correct starting point for trying Linux.
 
Last edited:
I have had another look at getting a line-in via my PC’s Realtek audio as there really isn’t another USB option that works with Linux.

I came across a built-in utility called alsamixer. It seams to be able to see all the ports on my Realtek sound chip. It even had a volume control for line-in which was muted!

My hopes were dashed, of an easy fix, as enabling the line-in channel did not pick up my music. I played around with it for a while and managed to get the line-in to act like a microphone input, not sure how or why it suddenly came to life. I reduced the recording volume right down so the signal does not overwhelm the input, and it works in stereo with no signal drops or error messages.

Tenacity (my recording app) does not see the correct Line-in and out devices, but I have found selecting default from the drop-down device’s menu works.
 
Getting close now.

Tested Eve online multiple clients via Steam Proton and it seems to be working well.

I need a Virtual Machine host to install on my last machine to run a small Windows 11 VM for MS office apps and to use devices that don't have a Linux driver.
Which is better VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Pro(I think I saw that this is free for personal use), or other?
 
Last edited:
I think I will start with Virtualbox, QEMU/KVM looks interesting, technical, and highly configurable. I had not heard of it before, something for me to learn at another time.

My priority is to get as much software off Windows as possible onto Linux equivalents. Except I need to keep MS Office apps to maintain my knowledge otherwise I would start forgetting how to do stuff.

It’s a shame WINE does not have better compatibility with MS Office as I wouldn’t need a separate VM. From what I have found out, Office 2010 only sort of works in WINE and its downhill from there.

Am I right in thinking Lebra Office and Google workspace use different commands and syntax compared to MS Office? Can you create custom commands like in the Vbasic backend in Excel and Access?
 
RavenLunatic said:
Getting close now.

Tested Eve online multiple clients via Steam Proton and it seems to be working well.

I need a Virtual Machine host to install on my last machine to run a small Windows 11 VM for MS office apps and to use devices that don't have a Linux driver.
Which is better VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Pro(I think I saw that this is free for personal use), or other?
Click to expand...

I've not used QEMU in awhile but in my experience VirtualBox is more robust for Windows virtual machines running on other OSes (or Windows VMs on Windows) and QEMU better for the other way around where you are emulating other OSes in Windows.
 
Last edited:
Rroff said:
I've not used QEMU in awhile but in my experience VirtualBox is more robust for Windows virtual machines running on other OSes (or Windows VMs on Windows) and QEMU better for the other way around where you are emulating other OSes in Windows.
Click to expand...

That's why I always use KVM packages in situ with it - we run KVM/QEMU in production for a few thousand VMs and get zero issues with Windows guests.
 
I am having an issue with my second PC getting an app called Onedriver to install. On my first PC all I had to do was “sudo apt install onedriver”, But my second PC is having none of it. It says it cannot find the package. I assume its due to a repository I am missing but I don’t know which one I should add.
 
I was about to make a start on my final computer when I saw there was a system update on my second computer applied the update and now it won't start lol. The kernel has updated from *.*.*,27 to *.*.*.28. I was able to get back in using GRUB to the earlier kernel but its no good for me if I cannot update anymore, so I will have to start from scratch. Probably for the best I get more practice before wiping my main PC.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom