Today I am moving not only myself, but my parents to Linux!
For me this is a long time coming. I discovered and started dabbling with Linux when I was 13 or so and somehow got an image of Backtrack 5 running on a Macbook Pro without virtualization (I’m still not entirely certain how I managed it) as I was always interested in IT/Security.
Eventually I went to school for IT and I’ve been working in tangents of the industry ever since, though few of my workplaces have made use of Linux unfortunately.
I have been running Debian on my personal laptop for a couple years now and I have had very few problems outside of breaking my sources.list the other day when I echo’d into it with instead of >.
I have a friend who recently fully switched over to Arch as well, and now more than ever I have found that all my friends, including those who are non-technical, are interested in learning about or moving to Linux, so I have decided now would be a good time to be an example for them.
I have made my parents aware of the ongoing and worsening problems with Windows and that their version of the OS will be out of support soon and today I’ll be putting them on Mint. I don’t expect any problems as I already had them using Open Office and other such applications since they didn’t want to buy licensing for MS Office years ago. Furthermore their computer has no special hardware/software otherwise, it’s basically just a Micro-ITX email machine that they sometimes use for printing.
I have enjoyed using Debian on my laptop so I intend to install Debian 12 to my desktop system, though I expect some complications as it has some hardware I have not had to configure on Linux before. Specifically It has an NVIDIA EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA and an NZXT Kraken Liquid CPU cooler.
I am aware that Debian has full documentation on how to go about installing and setting up the drivers for an RTX card, but if anyone has done this, I would certainly appreciate any anecdotal advice regarding the matter as well as anything I might want to know about making sure the cooler is functioning.
If anyone wants to offer advice but needs to know more about the hardware, I have the following specifically:
- PSU - Cooler Master V750 Gold V2, 750 Watt, White
- Motherboard - ATX ASUS PRIME z390-A
- Case - White NZXT H510 Elite for ATX form factor, Tempered Glass, Integrated RGB lighting
- CPU Cooling - NZXT Kraken X53 240mm AIO RGB CPU Liquid cooler, Rotating infinity mirror design, improved pump
- GPU - EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 ULTRA
- RAM - Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4, White
- Storage - Two 2 TB Seagate Firecuda M.2 NVME’s
- Peripherals include a focusrite Scarlett audio interface, Wired Logitech mouse and keyboard, Logitech C920 HD Pro Camera
Thanks for any advice, and I just wanted to offer a thanks to this community at large as I have read and learned some very neat things since I joined Lemmy.
EDIT:
I have successfully installed Mint for the parents! It went off mostly without a hitch. I found that Brother provides Linux drivers/utility scripts for their printers on a per-model basis so I was glad to see they really were at my side haha. Unfortunately, while the printer is detected and prints, even after installing the scanner driver for the model, I can’t seem to get the device to be detected as a scanner in either the simple scan utility or in xsane, so I will be troubleshooting that in the coming days. Otherwise I am very pleased with it.
EDIT 2:
I return to you all from my fresh Debian system!
The system, applications, and most configs have all been set now, it is mainly my files remaining for transfer.
So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done. After adding the repo’s the Nvidia drivers installed like a dream. As I have 3 displays there was a little bit of fun in setting the proper display configuration for pre-login positioning, but those fixes were really quite straightforward.
It is about 5 AM so I am going to bed and continue onward into a brighter future tomorrow, but I wanted to thank you all again and provide the somewhat obligatory neofetch screenshot before I left.
Have you considered other distros? I’ve had lots of success with the immutable fedora variants, which offer great stability and NVIDIA drivers in the base system. If you need apt, you create a new Debian container in the box buddy and make that container be your default when opening a terminal.
Gnome variant: https://projectbluefin.io/
KDE variant: https://getaurora.dev/
Gaming variant: https://bazzite.gg/
They are all the same distro with different desktop setup and default apps. You can install one of them and seamlessly switch to another one without losing any data.
Thank you for your advice, I had looked at Bazzite as well, but wanted to try for Debian first as it is simply where I have the most personal experience and I enjoy the bedrock-tier stability despite not having the cool shiny new things (There are some things I cant install yet as they are new and written with rust libs not available for the current Debian release).
If the graphics card creates too much trouble for me I am likely to distro hop and would be looking at Bazzite, EndeavorOS, or one of the other suggestions from this thread, so I really appreciate your suggestions and advice. Thank you!
FYI, the creators of Aurora/ Bazzite/ Bluefin are currently working on bootable CentOS stream based OCI images. This means, that you will get a LTS version, similar to Debian, but image based and WAY more slow paced.
My experience with uBlue has been flawless, but I don’t know if I would recommend it to an elderly person, because they might change a bit, and change is a stress factor for many people that age.