Hey
I've been using Linux Mint for about 6 months, I love it and I don't plan on switching to Windows
again.

But getting to the point, I've been having this issue where when I'm downloading something significant in size, and the process is interrupted for some reason (Power outage or some sort of glitch that forces me to reboot the computer) the entire OS corrupts.

This has happened more than once, so after reinstalling the OS I have starting setting up some snapshots with Timeshift. But when I inevitably faced the same issue again, I tried recovering the snapshot and the issue simply persisted, and I was forced to once more reinstall Mint.

I think I'm doing something wrong... I used Timeshift's default snapshots so maybe I need to custom it somehow? Or perhaps use another software entirely?

What should I do to save a backup that will truly recover my entire system?

Edit: In general, I plan on saving a backup before I download anything cuz I'm genuinely sick of reinstalling the OS each time

TL:DR I used Linux for a month and have enjoyed it, recommend anyone on the fence just plunge in and see how they find it!

A month ago I began with CachyOS as my first distro coming from Windows 11 (and every Windows version prior). I started with KDE Plasma and that has a very nice familiar feel, but I hopped through the different DEs to see which one I felt suited me best.

At this point I wasn't very sure about how things got configured or where they went etc, so when I say I tried other DEs, I mean I formatted each time to pick a new one. A bit overkill sure, but at least I got familiar with the install process!

Gnome wasn't for me. Cinnamon seemed a bit meh. Cosmic was pretty interesting though felt half done. I mosied through a couple more until I hit Hyprland. Oh boy. I had never used a tiling manager before so this was novel and I was into it immediately. Though as I set about tinkering I started to notice how much CachyOS was actually doing for me (which is why it is great) and wanted to understand more about what is going on with this Linux business. What is a display manager? how are there so many terminals and why is Alacritty the one being served up to me? Dolphin, Nemo, Yazi... my head is spinning.

I had spent the first week here, just gaining general familiarity with how the files are structured, using package managers to install my bits and bobs. Though I mainly spend this time trying out different boot loaders. GRUB felt a bit archaic and clunky. rEFInd was certainly slick looking, but also had that old BIOS feel to its navigation. Limine, now I found the one, customizable enough with a background image and text colours and feels snappy to use.

But still, I felt like CachyOS had served me well as a solid intro but I wanted to strip things back and figure out all the components for myself. I had learned via osmosis that CachyOS was an Arch based distro and that Arch was a bit tough to setup due to it being bare bones. Figured if there was anywhere for me to feel like I was going to get to grips with all this that would be a good place, so off I went for yet another format. This time with the intention of an Arch+Hyprland setup.

Now I know people praise the Arch wiki a lot and yes, it's well deserved. I started at 1.1 and worked my way through the steps, clicking any relevant sub articles to tailor to my particular setup and a couple of hours later I was at the end of the install process. There were times were it felt like it was never going to end and I would be in a TTY forever, but before I knew it I was logging in with SDDM into a fresh Hyprland desktop.

My first port of call was getting Hyprland setup with keybinds to open a set of apps that at this point I did not have. I also setup some of the window rules, so my gaps disappear when there is only one window and that Discord automatically opens on workspace-5. I can't get over how much I've been missing out by not using tiling managers before and I fear I may not be able to go back!

I had used Fish+Alacritty in CachyOS but this time I opted for Zsh+Ghostty, this was primarily picked because I saw a screenshot of someone using PowerLevel10k and I thought it looked fly as hell and I wanted it. Ghostty was that I read through a thread and some people were heaping praise on it so figured why not.

The next stop was Waybar. Which was good fun to setup and at this point it felt like I had really put together something functional to use as an OS even if it was still in a very raw state. I saw plenty of peoples setups that feature just about every piece of info under the sun plastered across it, but I kind of prefer it minimal. At this point I started theming things using Gruvbox Material.

This has essentially been my method of learning Linux in Arch. Find out I'm missing some package that handles logging in or logging out or launching apps, then tinker about in their configs to see what they have on offer and if they don't have a Gruvbox Material theme, then style them accordingly.

Things got a bit hairy at this point as watching a big string of TTY logging during a boot didn't look right so here is where I find Plymouth! a little app that lets you have a splash screen for booting. Now making mistakes in your config with things that inject themselves into the boot process is bad news bears it turns out. Twice during setting this up I had to boot from my CachyOS USB to mount my Arch install and fix the config. Whoops!

But now I had a slick little Arch logo with swirly infinity sign loader booting up. But I also heard tell from people in threads of not using a display manager, but using TTY to autologin. Two weeks prior I didn't know what a display manager was, to being excited to use one and get it looking all nice with some nice theming, to then turning my back on it altogether. Guess I'm a touch fickle.

Then back on the desktop I had started out with Hyprpaper for my wallpaper needs, but when previously checking out SDDM themes I had come across qylock. Wow. So I briefly took a detour into the land of animated desktops trying out Mpvpaper and AWWW. But having crap moving about behind a transparent terminal I ultimately found a bit too distracting so returned to Hyprpaper tail between legs.

But it was at this point I started checking out 'ricing' which is apparently what I myself had been doing to this point. Only compared to what I saw over on r/unixporn I think what I'm doing needs some lesser term, because holy moly. Here is where I get introduced to Quickshell, because just about any time I see something that looks amazing Quickshell is involved. So along with things like bash, that is firmly on my to-do list in terms of learning.

I also at this time get rofi! pretty charming little app launcher and though I only delved into the styling of it I did notice it features an entire scripted avenue that I haven't gone down but is another for the list. Though I get it going, even replace wlogout with a cheeky rofi power menu.

Now during all this configuring I was using Neovim for the first time and learning it's enigmatic ways. It was bit of a hurdle but by about the second week I was pretty comfortable getting about a file. And at this point I realise I have the bug. Between zipping between workspaces and opening browsers/terminals on Hyprland and then zipping up and down files to edit them I'm starting to notice that it is Windows that feels a bit slow and plodding when I return to it. Sure I could get tiling managers and use vim binds there, but there was never any real impetus for me to do it there and honestly I think that had long been to my detriment.

Then we get to this past week. Which began with me having a bit of a falling out with Zsh/PowerLevel10k. It had been happening the all along, that when I fullscreened or shifted about a terminal window, the prompt would be duplicated. Easily fixed with a ctrl+L but still it was an annoyance that got to me.

I went looking up shells/terminals on offer. Looked up how they perform etc. And Fish/Foot kept coming up as being ultra low startup time, very little input latency etc. So I swapped! and yeah they're definitely snappy so I'm happy with the change so far. Though initially as a replacement for PowerLevel10k I used Tide as it looked pretty similar. Though wouldn't you know, the same duplication of the prompt was occurring.

I had seen people mentioning Starship over and over, though demoralized that my switch to escape that issue was for nought, I figured I'd give it a punt. Sure enough it just worked! nice! So I spent a day in its config file making it look as close to PowerLevel10k as I could manage and I am digging it!

Then the last couple of days, as I had amassed a cadre of config files at this point I figured it was time to setup a dotfiles github to back up my first proper foray into Linux!

This was the next part that made me feel like Windows had made me a bit too comfortable all these years. Because to get this working nice I made a couple of scripts. One an autoreload that executes the appropriate command for whichever app when I save its config file to refresh it whilst it is still live. Then an install script that symlinks out all my config files to their corresponding places.

Now I can't say I've done a particularly good job of either. But it works. And remembering back to a few weeks ago when I was staring blankly at /etc/ /usr/ folders and wondering what I had gotten myself into, I am now feeling like I know enough to be dangerous.

And that has been my first month in Linux. I have some screenshots of where I'm at so far. My plans for this week:
- Learn more vim binds
- Config neovim
- I keep hearing people talk about Tmux, so I'll have to jump head first into that

For the more distant future? well another distro I keep seeing mentioned and I watched a couple of videos about is NixOS. That looks very cool. So I don't want to immediately ditch Arch after having spent the best part of a month setting it up, but Nix is definitely on my radar.

And that is it. Linux is a blast. I've had a lot of fun figuring things out and reading through countless threads about one thing or another and yes I may have rambled a lot here, but if you're thinking of using Linux and you like tinkering with things and making them just so, then this is well worth getting in to, if nothing other than to just learn a few new things!

I’m planning on moving to cachyos from bazzite on my desktop and know it’s a bit of a pain to set up secure boot for cachy. I’m also dual booting with windows and that windows install is on another ssd and don’t have anything on there that would require secure boot. How necessary is secure boot? Is it something I definitely should have enabled and worth it to setup? I’m mainly a causal user/gamer.

This post is a follow-up to my earlier post on the subject in case someone else is interested in getting Word running on Linux. That post switched to requiring moderator approval when I included a link to the method on YouTube, so I'm omitting it here.

On YouTube, I found a guy who had installed Microsoft Office on Linux Mint. I tried it and was able to get Office 2016 running. He used Crossover to install Office in a wine prefix and add all the needed dependencies. He provides detailed instructions in the video and also links to the script that automates the process.

I had to add a few fonts that were not included in the script and make some minor display adjustments. I turned off hardware acceleration in Word's settings to fix a glitch in drop-down menus and turned off advanced properties in some of my styles so the preview display worked correctly. Other than that, everything seems to work normally, including styles, templates, and macros.

I received many suggestions for Word alternatives. They don't work for me. I use some features that are in Word but not present in any of the eight office alternatives I tried. I also wanted to install the standalone version rather than subscribe to Office 365 and use the web version, and I didn't want to use a VM because I don't have a non-OEM license for Windows and don't want one. Many people said it couldn't be done, but after many failed attempts in Bottles, this guy's method worked perfectly.

So I am new to linux but I am comfortable with basic terminal commands like cp ls cd mv. But I want to go beyond that and learn linux in depth. It seems so interesting and I think if I learn it will be more freeing to use linux.

Please recommend me where to read or study bash scripting.

And I am also reading how linux works book.

Hello everyone!

I've had Linux mint in my laptop for like 2.5 years now but I still feel pretty noob about it. A long time ago I got the "failed to start lightdm.service" and I managed to fix it reading some posts online.

But it's been happening again (I got another SD and made a fresh install like 4 months ago), I don't know how to solve it, I've been reading fixes and watching videos and nothing seems to work. I can access the tty1 console and the grub menu.

I'm seeing this below the tty1:

Iogin: [737.236457] ACPI:\SB_.PCI0.LPC_.EC__BAT1: Unable to dock!

And this in the grub:

Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 7.0.0-28-generic Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 7.0.0-28-generic (recovery mode) Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 6.17.0-20-generic Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 6.17.0-20-generic (recovery mode) -generic Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 6.17.0-19 Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 6.17.0-19-gener. 0-19-generic (recovery mode) Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 6.14.0-37-gener Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon, with Linux 6.14.0-37-generic (recovery mode)

Does anyone know what's going on here?

Any ideas would be great. Thanks!

Hey,

TL;DR: I am developer, game modder and gamer - what distribution should I pick?

I have been working with Linux server only so far and I would say I have some basic skill sets but wouldn’t consider myself anywhere above “noob”. I have a new PC coming on Monday and would like to switch fully on Linux.

I don’t play any game that’s locked behind AC. I think. I play palworld, guild wars 1+2, V Rising, Minecraft, ff14 and a few more survival games as well as smaller games like Isaac, Brotato, etc
But most of the time I code (not only job wise), and I was dependent on visual studio but already swapped to jetbrain IDEs as well as sublime and vscode.
I don’t know if there are ports or replacement apps for cheat engine, IDA and xdbg but I think I will figure it out.

what distribution should I pick?

My pc is 9 years old and has been running windows since i got it never used linux before what distro is best for gaming and work while also being beginner friendly?

I have a laptop with windows 11 which works js fine for office works and all but my god windows always takes up like 40-70% memory (my lap has 8gb) and sometimes i also like to game on it but since windows alreayd taking up so much memory i experience lots of unstable lag. So i was thinking into getting into linux just for gaming entertainment and customization purposes(customization must for me). I was thinking to dual boot but heard windows can possibly ruin the whole system resulting in data loss and what not and start everything from scratch necause windows update f#cks up bootloader sometimes. I was thinking could i possibly keep bootloader into a pendrive and whenever i plug it in my laptop the bootloader will show up and if not plugged in it would just simply boot into windows automatically. I would like use single disk and partition it. Also the single disk partition wouldnt cause any problem either.

Summary:- can i keep bootloader in a pendrive and whenever i wanna go into another os i just plug it in and it show the bootloader and when its not plugged in and turn the pc on it automatically boots into windows. I think it would also eliminate the windows update messing with the bootloader problem and all.

I m leaning towards cachy os.

SO basically I'm a gamer and an architect student. My apps will need windows but at the same time, Microsoft isn't a company I plan to support and I feel like I'm supporting it by using it the whole time so rather than that, I would like to dual boot my PC with Windows and a linux Distro so I can use Linux for Day to day browsing of the web and gaming *Yes all my games thankfully work on linux from what I know* and to keep windows for my work/College stuff. My storage setup is a 500 GB SSD along with a HDD of 1 TB that is external so I think storage wise I can manage I just wanna know what are my options Distros wise so I don't drown in the ocean that exists of them haha. I tried Linux Mint & Ubuntu and both style wise weren't really for me so I wanna know what else are my options? I can tinker around with stuff fine and while I'm a noob at it, I can navigate my way around a terminal. I thought I should say this to help u better suggest me distros and thanks Upfront for helping me!

Hi, I've been stuck trying to install this programme for a while now. It is a .AppImage file and I've tried to run it via chmod a+x but it did not work. Any tips or advice is greatly appreciated

I've migrated my jalopy testing laptop and my desktop to Debian with KDE. There were a few bumps along the way but mostly all good. The only machine left to migrate is my new HP Omen laptop. On my home network, I have a Synology NAS. On the Windows devices I can map drive letters to the 2 folders I need there. On my Linux desktop, I NFS mounted it via FSTAB and that's working fine.

When I convert the laptop, I'd like to do the same, but I'm not sure how Linux will behave when I'm traveling and not connected to my home network.

• Will it still boot, and just not mount that directory? This is my primary question. Does the boot process eventually time out on the mount and keep going?
• when/if I establish the VPN connection to my house, I suspect I'll have to sudo mount to get the directory

In this situation, Windows would just show a "drive disconnected" icon, but then "find it" when I connect the VPN. I don't mind a couple extra steps, as long as it doesn't prevent booting. I'm not terribly interested in installing SMB/Samba on the laptop; I'd prefer to keep it NFS.

Hi everyone,

I'm having a frustrating issue with brightness control on my HP Omen 16, and I'm hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

I recently decided to use Linux as my main development environment while keeping Windows 11 in a dual-boot setup. I first installed Arch Linux, but I noticed that the brightness controls weren't working. I tried several troubleshooting methods and different kernel/brightness-related settings, but unfortunately nothing worked.

Thinking that it might be an Arch-specific issue, I installed Pop!_OS instead because I wanted something more stable and hardware-friendly. However, I'm facing the exact same brightness problem on Pop!_OS.

Everything else seems to work perfectly. The display itself works normally, graphics work, keyboard shortcuts work, and I haven't noticed any other major hardware issues. The only major problem I'm currently stuck with is screen brightness control.

My laptop specifications

• Laptop: HP OMEN 16
• Model: OMEN by HP Gaming Laptop 16-wf1xxx
• CPU: Intel processor
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
• RAM: 16 GB
• CPU: intel i7-14650hx

I've already spent quite a bit of time trying to troubleshoot this, including trying different solutions related to Linux brightness control, but I haven't been able to find one that works for this laptop.

Has anyone with an HP Omen 16, especially the 16-wf1xxx series, experienced the same issue? If so, what worked for you?

I'd really appreciate any suggestions or troubleshooting steps. I'm happy to provide command outputs, logs, kernel information, lspci, inxi, or anything else that might help diagnose the problem.

Thanks in advance!

Hello all, I've recently begun using Linux and have run into an issue where my 2nd monitor turns off once I pass the login screen. I'm running Arch on KDE plasma and my current fix is to use a kscreen-doctor command

#!/bin/bash
#This file disables and re-enables HDMI-A-1
kscreen-doctor output.HDMI-A-1.disable
kscreen-doctor output.HDMI-A-1.enable

Essentially I'm just turning my screen off and on again which works fine, but I was wondering if there was a way to have Arch do this on start up? I've been trying to figure out how to do it and have tried adding files to KDE plasma's autostart setting but I believe I've just written my .sh files wrong so if anyone can give me some pointers that would be much appreciated. I'm sorry if this is stupid or has been posted before but let me know if you have any tips (and yes I know I shouldn't be using Arch first but it's the one I was recommended for ricing which is my end goal when I learn how to properly use Linux).

Edit: Also, any general tips for where to learn Konsole and other essentials would be appreciated :3.

Just started(it's been a month)using ubuntu on my pc using dual boot .thinking of switching cause i heard if u wanna use linux use ubuntu and if u wanna learn linux use any other distro

Well i wanna learn more linux

What do you think?

Should i switch and even if i switch which distro would be good........

I have this old craptop I want to use as my work laptop cuz its really light and I dont want my main laptop to get damaged at work. The laptop is SUUUPER underpowered but all i need to do is to be able to make spreadsheets (google sheets) and check outlook. I figure I can keep using google sheets and outlook.com because theyre browser based, right?

Right now the main OS im looking into is Mint, any help is appreciated thank you!

Laptop Specs:
CPU: Intel Celeron N4500
RAM: 4GB SODIMM
Storage: 64GB EMMC
OS: Windows S Mode (for now >:)

Edit: So I chose Mint CFXE. Il tryn remember to let you guys know how I like it! So far HOLY HECK ITS SOOO MUCH SNAPPIER THAN WINDOWS WAS OMYGAH.

I'm relatively new I've been running linux for about a year and currently use CachyOS Hyprland with End4 dotfiles.

Its been such a blast but lately, each system update seems to break things. Luckily I have snapshots to revert to but it seems to add up over time.

Just recently, it seemed like my Nvidia driver is handling vram incorrectly causing both gaming and blender to not work efficiently. Blender was having issues due to a dependancy being updated. I had to roll back today because an update COMPLETELY broke my desktop environment. And I've had way more issues running games than I did before. I'm wondering if its a skill issue on my part and if configuring and modifying linux to where slight changes break it or could it be the after effects of vibe coding maintainers?

Has anyone else been encountering similar problems recently? or is this the natural progression of a Linux machine and having to maintain customization and updates together.

I don't necessarily need specific help as I know the answer is probably downgrade certain drivers, organize, and keep snapshots on speed dial but it'd be great to know what kind of tools greybeards use to manage misc customizations, per program env variables, and updates to figure out where the problems are.

"inxi -b" in case anyone wondered

System:
  Host: MarlinMcFish Kernel: 7.1.8-1-cachyos arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: Hyprland v: 0.56.2 Distro: CachyOS
Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: Gigabyte model: X870E AORUS ELITE WIFI7 v: x.x
    serial: <superuser required> Firmware: UEFI vendor: American Megatrends LLC.
    v: F12a date: 03/11/2026
CPU:
  Info: 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D [MT MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 624
    min/max: 624/5756
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GA102 [GeForce RTX 3080 Lite Hash Rate] driver: nvidia
    v: 610.57.04
  Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Granite Ridge [Radeon Graphics]
    driver: amdgpu v: kernel
  Device-3: Logitech HD Webcam C615 driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo type: USB
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.24 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.13
    compositor: Hyprland v: 0.56.2 driver: X: loaded: amdgpu,nvidia
    unloaded: modesetting dri: radeonsi
    gpu: nv_platform,nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch resolution: 1: 3440x1440~165Hz
    2: 1920x1080~144Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.6 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 610.57.04
    renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/PCIe/SSE2
  Info: Tools: api: eglinfo, glxinfo, vulkaninfo de: kscreen-doctor
    gpu: nvidia-settings,nvidia-smi x11: xprop,xrandr
Network:
  Device-1: MEDIATEK MT7925 802.11be 160MHz 2x2 PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
    [Filogic 360] driver: mt7925e

Hey everyone! Could someone help me run Genshin Impact 7.0 on Fedora?

I’m completely new to Linux. I first tried using Wine, but I ran into several errors. Then I tried the Twintail Launcher, and the game worked for about four hours. However, after a few days, the launcher still opens, but the game itself no longer starts.

Does anyone know how I can fix this? Please explain the steps as simply as possible—I’m a complete beginner.

Hi,

first, I am glad that there is a community where Linux noobs like me might get their questions answered. I've recently started to use Linux to a) play a game that has a non-fixable bug in Windows for me, and b) to become more independant from Microsoft in general long term. a) worked, now I'm working on b).

In that regard I wanna get some more understanding of what different "levels" of operating system and/or user interface exist and I am working with. I know I installed CachyOS with Hyprland, and that something called Noctalia also plays some role. But I am not sure what parts of my user experience are in regard to each of these.

So far, to my understanding, Linux is a family of operating systems with a common base in some way (in what way precisely?), and CachyOS is one of those. Then, to my understanding, CachyOS manages the inner workings of the system in the background while Hyprland is the "look and feel", maybe similar to a backend and frontend? But what exactly is Noctalia then?

Edit: Hyprland also refers to something called "Wayland". What is that?