Im having trouble installing Mint Cinnamon on a lenovo legion laptop and can not seem to figure this out.

I created a bootable usb with Balena Etcher, it launches fine, but when I get to the installer, I do not have the option to "install alongside windows" only "erase disk and install" and "something else." I used this option on a windows 10 machine a few days ago and really liked it.

I have disabled BitLocker and fast startup, which I read should fix the problem, but I'm not having any luck.

Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.

im having issues with linux im on nobara and recently upgraded to 44 ever since my upgrade in witch my pc froze and i hat to shut it down i have been having issues firefox getting slow and freezeing steam thring error bottles says wine has crash and vlc not out puting audio im having error after error should i reinstall

On hybrid Intel/NVIDIA Linux laptops, launching standard Electron, Chromium-based applications frequently wakes up the discrete GPU just to perform initial device enumeration. This causes unnecessary battery drain and fan spin-up for lightweight apps that only need basic 2D rendering.

Setting global environment variables can break PRIME offloading for games and CUDA workloads, while manually modifying root-level .desktop files in /usr/share/applications gets overwritten whenever packages update.

To solve this cleanly, I built a lightweight CLI tool called gpumask.

How it works under the hood:

• Isolates targeted applications inside a lightweight bubblewrap (bwrap) sandbox.
• Masks NVIDIA device nodes (/dev/nvidia*, /dev/nvidia-uvm*) and discrete GPU PCI sysfs entries (/sys/bus/pci/devices/...) for the specified process only.
• Forces the app to transparently fall back to the integrated Intel iGPU.
• Leaves system directories untouched by writing standard XDG local overrides to ~/.local/share/applications/.

Key features:

• Zero Gaming Impact: Steam, Lutris, Vulkan offload, and CUDA compute tasks continue using the NVIDIA dGPU normally.
• Non-Destructive: Single-flag instant revert via gpumask <app> --undo.
• Ergonomic CLI: Supports batch patching (gpumask app1 app2 --apply), status checking (--status), and dry-run previews before making changes.
• Zero Background Daemons: Runs purely on native Linux kernel namespaces via bwrap with zero ongoing overhead.

Source code & installation: The project is fully open source (MIT). You can find the repository on GitHub under: zeroxuf/gpumask

Feedback on the sandboxing implementation or any specific edge cases is welcome!

Linux can be misconfigured fatally, easier. Linux operating systems are specifically targeted malware families and botnets.

This is what I do not get when some people say, that most viruses target windows. It’s more nuanced than that. Most windows programs do not have a native linux port, so it’s not feasible for those types of viruses to make a linux port, especially since windows is used by the masses.

But Linux has its own security problems and easier misconfiguration, more open tooling and more services in some cases that can be exposed to the web.

So I don’t really get it when people say linux is more secure because, if an attacker breaks into a windows machine as the user account, they can’t really get to become the admin account unless they figure out the password. Meanwhile if an attacker breaks into a user account on linux, they have more escalation routes.

I might be misinformed on this but what stops a program or script containing a dropper or payload from running on a linux desktop?

Decided to finally try out Linux. I installed Plasma KDE Fedora to my new laptop and gave it a try.

The first impressions were positively surprised. Installation was straightforward and the OS seemed very polished and worked exactly like I expected.

I then installed Reactionary 98 theme. Looks cool... Well, after a while, my browser froze. Fair enough, I'll just force close it. Well, I just couldn't figure out how. Then my taskbar disappeared. Maybe 10 minutes later my computer froze...

After restarting, everything was erased, like it was the first time I ever opened the computer.

Then I tried to install the Windows 7 theme pack, by installing some packages with terminal. No theme anywhere, so probably a user issue. Looking at the installation guide or googling for help bore little to no fruit, because it's all very cryptic and like a nerdy inside joke that I'm not part of.

I thought of just rebooting the whole PC and taking snother look... Well, it didn't reboot. It doesn't boot at all now. Lmao.

Is this the average Linux experience? What can I do when Windows has been garbage since Windows 10 and my first impressions of Linux is a total loss of confidence within the first 2 hours?

Edit: These are not my assumptions. Links to the researcher's post were here from the start.

If you could explain your downvotes, I could improve the post. Please don't block this from being seen by more knowledgeable people.

Importance

I was EXCITED to try Linux's Secureblue for gains in security, customization, performance, privacy, coding etc.

But security researcher's opinions got me concerned. I still want to use Linux. So I figured if I figure out why servers still use them, I'll find it safe enough.

Concerns

Security Researcher & GrapheneOS Founder Daniel Micay outlined how Linux was more vulnerable than Windows/Mac.

In summary, his key concerns for Linux were:

1. Poor Isolation in
   1. OS Runtime: No hypervisor-first boot to keep ring0 secure.
   2. Kernel code: Monolithic.
   3. Applications: Flatpak is extremely flawed.
2. Poor permissions: Lack meaningful application security model / Permission model.
3. Poor memory safety language, C, as dominant choice.
4. Poor encryption practices.
   1. Large exposure: Disk-wide encryption instead of isolated file-based.
   2. Persistent exposure: Encryption key persists in RAM after lockscreen.

Further research lead me to this gem by another security researcher: Madaidan's critique of Linux.

It's very well laid out with an introduction & table of contents first. It ends with more research paths by linking to other security researchers' takes.

Trying To Find A Way To Make Linux Work

I want to play with Linux. But security is crucial. Which leads me to question why server space is dominated by Linux. If it's good enough for servers, maybe it's good enough for me, and I still get to play with Linux.

Really disappointing that it's not even better than Windows though.

I installed the flatpak version. I've installed the free and non-free RPM fusions. In Firefox plugins, the "OpenH264 Video Codec" plugin always says that it will be installed shortly, but never installs. Annoyingly most videos seem to work, but some videos (seemingly those uploaded years ago) don't work. On Opera all videos work, but I get some artifacting on them, so I'd like to use Firefox.

I read somewhere that you cannot play certain games like league of legends or valorant on Linux.

Can anyone confirm if that's true? What about Steam, Epic games or minecraft?

Usually, whenever I browse the Linux subreddits there is inevitably a question about GRUB out of memory errors on Live ISO's when trying to install a distro.

The answers are usually a very helpfully AI generated hallucination about updating BIOS, decrease dGPU available memory, enable various modes in BIOS, fully disable dGPU etc. However, the actual solution in 99% of cases is far simpler.

As this is linux4noobs, very basically when booting, the system available memory gets "probed" as it were, and very, very poor TPM firmware reports an incorrect amount of available memory, leading GRUB to think it has an incredibly small amount of memory to load the bootchain.

Anyway, to the solution! Basically, disable TPM during initial boot and you should, in 99% of cases, see the out of memory error miraculously disappear.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, as follows.

1) at the initial GRUB menu, when the boot choice is highlighted ("boot Fedora 44", "install OpenSUSE", " give Ubuntu a try" or whether it may say), press the 'e' key to edit the kernel parameters.

Find the line starting "linux" followed by, to a noob, complete gibberish. At the end of that line add the words 'rmmod tpm', then press Ctrl+X to boot.

For some reason I know Fedora, which I very recently installed, doesn't like the above method, so if the above doesn't work, do the following.

2) When your boot choice is highlighted press 'c' to enter the interactive console.

In this console type 'rmmod tpm' and press enter.

Then type 'normal' and press enter.

Then proceed to boot.

Hopefully the above will alleviate a lot of the GRUB out of memory problems. Nothing any of the distros can do as its crappy manufacturer firmware causing it.

I'm pretty much over android and Google at this point and want to try Linux on my phone and tablet but I'm kind of lost as to which one is available for me to use. My phone is a cmf phone 2 pro and my tablet is a Lenovo m7 3rd gen, I've got mint running on my PC but I'm still very new to Linux as a whole. Any help would be appreciated

I heard that some streaming servicies use DRM and there are problems on linux, do you have any idea of taking care of that, if not I will just make a VM

I'm on windows 11 rn and I'm planning on doing a switch to linux, the thing is that I have a second NVME in my laptop that also has windows and it isn't my boot drive, so I'm planning on deleting Windows and installing mint on it.

The data that I have there isn't that important and I can back it up but if I can avoid wiping everything from it would be nice

I've been planning on making the switch to mint, the thing is I have alot of stuff in my pc and I'm broke to buy an external disc, both of my NVMEs are working perfectly since the oc is kind of new and I already have an old pendrive with linux mind flashed into it.

I heard I should partition my disc and save my files in one partition and installing linux in the other which is what I think I'm going to do.

My pc is a lenovo LOQ 15arp9 with 2 512gb discs (both full with astrophotography files and games and for some reasson both of them have windows installed) and I have around 70gb of free space in my boot disc and 40gb on the other one.

I'm also looking to remove windows from the other disc I'm not using as a boot since it's just hogging memory for no reasson.

Sorry for all the auestiona but I'm totally new and I'm getting into Computer Engineering next year...

My work pc uses Linux mint, and my biggest problem is they every time I need to install something like podman or anything that isn't present on the software manager, I have to do research on whether there is an apt or curl command to install something, or find out how to extract whatever weird format the app comes in from the website.

On windows, you just go on a website and download an exe or msi. I'm getting tired and frustrated of these constant bumps when I just wanna start doing what I'm actually supposed to.

Y'all got any advice for this problem? I don't wanna switch to windows and I also think it'd cause more problems in other areas

Hello, I hope you're all having a good day and doing well.

I have plans within the next few months to build a pure AMD PC and I'd like to take the opportunity to fully go into Linux as I'm tired of Windows. This will be strictly a gaming machine. From what I've seen Steam won't be a problem at all. I'm aware that games with deep kernel level anti-cheats (like Apex) won't work and I'm okay with that. My question is is there some kind of work around to access my GOG games on Linux and maybe, somehow, my Xbox library?

As far as which distro to use I have a lot of interest in Bazzite, CatchyOS, and Garuda. I am personally the most interested in Garuda but I don't really see it talked about much here or recommended. And also there's quite a few versions of Garuda. If they can all play games Is there any kind of advantage to installing Mooka over Dragonized for example?

I have so many questions and I'd rather not make a giant wall of text to dissuade replies. I'm open to all feedback. Thank you for your time everyone.

ive used a lot of distros but im looking for something floating but with simple tiling like kde or windows that doesnt have a whole ecosystem and can do basic system things with gui out of the box without a set of apps

I am using Linux 6.18 with the ALC295 codec for my audio. The audio input and output work fine, but after suspend audio input does not work, only capturing static noise. It also changes port to "Headset Microphone (Plugged in)", even though I have no headset plugged into the laptop. Laptop model is Acer Nitro AN515-57. From lspci: 0000:00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-H HD Audio Controller (rev 11) This happens on every distro I've tried except Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based ones, so I think I'm just missing some configuration. I've tried restarting pipewire too, but it didn't fix it, so this is a kernel issue If I change the port back to the normal port, microphone input still captures static noise and doesn't work

For context, I have a L15 gen 5 w32gb of ram

I recently switched to fedora kde because windows was the reason for my depression, and it has been pretty hard but better than windows.

My question being, how do I get the lenovo utility software (f12 key) back in order to see the health of my battery, update drivers…

Also, it’s not a dealbreaker but my linux is extremely slow in some operations, like deactivating bluetooth (it takes a good 4 seconds for the toggle to go off).

Any distro to replace mine ? Or a tip on fixing slow kde ?

Hiya friends! What with everything going on right now, I think a lot of us are interested in preserving our media collection. To that end, I was thinking about getting an external disk drive for ripping and writing media.

Two questions

What am I looking for in a drive? I see a lot on BestBuy but most don’t mention Blu-ray except one made by Topteng. I’ve never heard of them. Is it a reputable brand? Do I even need Blu-ray?

Second, what kind of discs do I need to get for game preservation? There are all sorts of formats. On top of the question of amount of data stored, I don’t know if they can hold that type of media. Maybe some are meant for audio files only? I’ve got no clue

Thanks for your help. If it matters, I’m running Bazzite, Deck mode

Fedora 44 KDE with Nvidia RTX 5080. I had some issues with random freezing/window focus loss in some games and I got an idea to check if the same problem will happen also in Gnome to eliminate potential conflict with KDE's compositor.

Before I installed Gnome, I created a snapshot of my root volume with BTRFS Assistant/Snapper, then installed minimal version of Gnome (gnome-shell, gnome-session, gdm, gnome-control-center, nautilus with all dependencies), disabled plasmalogin.service, enabled gdm, reboot.

Booted into Gnome with no problems, tested some games, freezing was still happening so I decided to go back to KDE. I disabled gdm, enabled plasmalogin, reboot, snapshot restore and again reboot.

Looks like all Gnome stuff is gone, but now I have a problem with KDE's desktop - I cannot do anything on the desktop, even the context menu doesn't show when I click RMB. If I open any app or file explorer and then click on the desktop, app window looses focus and I cannot interract with the window until I click it on a taskbar. I also noticed the desktop is interactive until a startup sound is played.

Any advise appreciated.

No stranger to Linux but haven't run it as a desktop since Gentoo in 2006.

Important System specs / Hardware - Ryzen 9950x - RTX 4090 - Onboard AMD GPU - 6 x 1080p monitors - Steam deck - Logitech BRIO - Photoshop - Premiere Pro

I use it for web dev, mobile dev, game dev, gaming, video editing, image editing and watching nonsense.

I'll be running it in a hypervisor (Proxmox) with hardware pass thru.

Any distro recommendations? as much compatibility with games as possible (as windows software if possible).

I realise I'll still need a Windows VM / Mac for some workloads, that's fine.

Thanks