I don't know how to get unbanned. I created an account with a wrong username (with typo) a few nights ago, tried again, and failed, gave up. Tried to create an account with a different name/email and got this. Unsure how long this will take to cool off. It said something about "send a mail to explain why you're creating accounts" before It just shows everything as this.

The only bloody reason I wanted to create an account was to see if I could set some kind of dark mode, looking at that wiki makes me feel like I'm starting into a lightbulb, but I'm running debian, and wanted to get info on the init system in use in debian.

Debian uses systemd as its default init system

Devuan was created specifically to avoid systemd, offering alternatives like SysV init, OpenRC, and runit

I do not know what an init system is. I don't know what systemd is. I do not know what Devuan is. I do not know what SysV init is. I do not know what OpenRC is. I do not know what runit is.

I vaguely understand what debian is. Although I would be the wrong person it explain it. I know it's the type of linux that ubuntu is. And I know it seems like every disto I look at says it's based on ubuntu, and therefore is debian since ubuntu is based on debian.

What I don't understand is if everyone hates ubuntu, but ubuntu is based on debian, but nobody hates debian, why is everything based on ubuntu and not debian?

How do I know if I want the debian version of a distro, or the devuan version? What are they even talking about?

Hello everyone.

It's been quite some time since I installed Linux alongside Windows, and recently I mostly just use Linux.

I made a mistake when partitioning my drive, multiple times. I tried dualboot on my previous machines in past and time and time again the same happens: I think "well linux is lightweight" and give it like a 50 GB partition, then realize it's not enough.

I think I managed to shrink my windows partition and grow my linux root partition once, however I don't remember how I did that exactly.

Now I'm thinking of a way to backup my windows partition and move it to an external USB drive, to reformat it for linux use, but still be able to boot into windows, maybe via VM? Is it doable?

My current partitions:

nvme0n1     259:0    0 476.9G  0 disk               # the only drive in my laptop
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0     1G  0 part /boot         # I think this is an "UEFI" partition, not sure if I can touch it in any way
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0    16M  0 part               # This is "Microsoft reserved partition", it was automatically created by windows during installation, not sure if I can touch this
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 129.4G  0 part /mnt/windows10    # my "C:\" partition with windows, ntfs, I want this to run in a VM or be bootable from external drive
├─nvme0n1p5 259:4    0    50G  0 part /             # My archlinux partition, ext4
├─nvme0n1p6 259:5    0  14.4G  0 part               # "WINDRIVER" partition, ntfs, I think it was there when I bought the laptop, not sure if can be touched in any way
└─nvme0n1p7 259:6    0 282.1G  0 part /mnt/games    # btrfs partition for data shared between windows and linux, here's my steam library with games, btrfs because it's well supported by linux and windows (with a third party driver)

What I ideally want:

• Probably UEFI partition
• 130 GB partition for archlinux, probably this should be ext4
• 280 GB partition for non-system data (movies, music etc), probably btrfs
• 50 GB partition for /home, probably btrfs as well
• Windows 10 as a bootable live USB or virtual drive that can be run in a VM stored on external USB stick

What are my options?

Is it possible to backup windows partition in way that it can later be run in a VM or being booted from external drive? Can I just format that partition into ext4, move my / partition files to the new partition and use it as my new root partition? I hope it won't break file permissions and stuff and "just work".

What can I do safely to get rid of windows on my drive, but still keep the working system somewhere else in case I need the software (you know, adobe, corel, MS office etc.)?

I'm not good with most of these things (partitions, can they be safely resized or moved around, backed up and restored, what's UEFI partition etc.).

Before you say "just make a backup and do whatever you want", I understand that this is what I should ideally be doing, but unfortunately I don't have multiple huge drives just laying around, I only have 1 external SSD which does not have too much free space, so I'd like to find some optimal way to achieve this without having to buy terabytes of additional storage.

Linux mint cinnamon 21 btw. I updated a bunch of applications yesterday. I couldn't tell you what got updated, I'm sorry. It was a bunch of stuff after not having updated much for several months.
(Edit: according to the modified date of my config files in /boot/, I might not've updated anything since January ):

On boot, I get the usual welcome from the motherboard screen:

AMIBIOS(C)2023 American Megatrends, Inc. ASUS PRIME B65OM-A AX ACPI BIOS Revision 1616
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8-Core Processor Speed: 4500MHz
Total Memory: 32768MB (DDR5-4800)
USB Devices total: 0 Drive, 4 Keyboards, 3 Mice, 3 Hubs
Detected Storages...
SATA6G_1: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 2TB
SATA6G_2: HDC HD6OEFZX-68B3FNO
SATA6G_3: WDC WD6OEFRK-68LOBN1
SATA6G_4: WDC WDS200T2BOA
M.2_2: Samsung SSD 990 PRO with Heatsink 1TB

In case it's relevant, the gpu is a MSI 6700xt. I'm not sure why it says 4 keyboards & 3 mice, but I do have a lot of USB cables plugged into the back for various reasons (maybe 8? 10?).

Then there appear these error messages for a few seconds:

0.3400851 pci 0000:10:00.0: Failed to read data
1.0549851 hub 8-0:1.0: config failed, hub doesn't have any ports! (err -19)
3.5725731 usb usb1-port6: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

Then the monitor goes black (like, no signal black).

What should I do/check?

BRB, looking to see if I can still ssh into my pc with my windows laptop

EDIT UPDATE: I checked my pc's IP address on the router. It's connected to the router via ethernet, and it's detected, Mac address provided and all. Even thought it seems connected to my router, and it's powered on, I'm still not getting a response.

I'm trying to ssh with windows powershell on win10. "ssh blindfrog(notmyactualusername)@localipaddress" and all.

ssh: connect to host localipaddress port22: Connection timed out

If anything, I'm fine with replacing parts if I have to, even my drives. My /home and other important files are backed up to my NAS

UPDATE: ~~I booted off a USB stick with Mint, found the initrd.img on my desktop pc under /boot/ There's a lot of versions of initrd listed, it looks like? They were all last modified the time of my update spree yesterday. How do I inspect them? Right clicking, I don't get an option to "mount" them, nor am I sure how to do it in terminal. Opening the folder in terminal, then doing just "mount initrd.img" gets me:~~

~~mount: initrd.img: can't find in /etc/fstab.~~

Gonna try to get to my pc's bootloader :u

UPDATE: Found grub config file in my pc under: /etc/default/grub.d/50_linuxmint.cfg

I followed these instructions and added these lines to the end of the file:

GRUB_TIMEOUT="5"
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE="menu"

Now I'm stuck on how to "sudo update-grub", but do it for the desktop pc, not my bootable usb stick, lol

UPDATE: Found this resource involving chroot. I followed the "Manual Grub Restoration Method," but first had to unmount the automatically mounted drive to emulate the instructions.

I had a problem at step 4, after successfully doing

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
I'm getting the response for each of the other bind commands:

sudo: unable to allocate pty: No such device

According to this source, I used --rbind instead at the first source's step 4, but kept getting the same "can't allocate pty" message.

UPDATE: Skipped all the above and went to chroot the automatically mounted drive with my OS

sudo chroot /media/mount/lotsoflettersandnumbers /bin/bash

Success! But "sudo update-grub" gets me:

/usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig: 37: /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib: cannot create /dev/null: Permission denied
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for / (is /dev mounted?)

I'm not sure how to properly set up my system before chroot so update-grub will work
So I can get to my desktop's bootloader
So I can see if there's something to help me recover the previous kernel with sufficient drivers

If I don't have any leads on this adventure by tomorrow morning, I'll just reinstall with Mint 23 v.v
Sneak edit: I swear on my life one of the update notifications was the release of Linux Mint 23, but nowhere can I find it online now. I skipped it after my million updates because I didn't want to break anything; figured Mint 21 support was probably expiring soon & I'd look up people's takes on the new version before updating to it-- but now it doesn't exist?

I have installed CachyOS in my main gaming machine and i want it to work like the steam deck: Boot into big picture mode and then you can exit to desktop mode. I went with the desktop image instead of the handheld one because i wanted to use GNOME. I've looked at the cachyos-handheld package but it seems its only for KDE systems.
I tried to make my own scripts to start the compositor using a one-shot system which i believe is what bazzite does, unfortunately i cant get the steam part to work, as the gnome part does work. If someone can take a look at it and give me a hand i would be extremely grateful.

Here is the script you run to switch the next boot:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

usage() {
  cat <<'EOF'
Usage: os-session-select <gamescope|gnome-wayland|gnome-xorg|plasma-wayland|plasma-xorg>

Writes ~/.config/steamos-session-select and logs you out so the one-shot wrapper
can launch the requested session exactly once on next login.
EOF
}

target="${1:-}"
case "$target" in
  gamescope|gnome) ;;
  -h|--help|"") usage; exit 1 ;;
  *) echo "Unknown target: $target"; usage; exit 1 ;;
esac

cfg="$HOME/.config"
sentinel="$cfg/steamos-session-select"
mkdir -p "$cfg"
printf '%s\n' "$target" > "$sentinel"

if command -v steam >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  steam -shutdown || true
fi

# End the current session (GDM should be set to autologin)
if [[ -n "${XDG_SESSION_ID:-}" ]]; then
  loginctl terminate-session "$XDG_SESSION_ID" || true
else
  systemctl --user exit || true
fi

It creates a file in the home directory to indicate to the boot script what to launch, then it kills the current session to restart the gdm manager.

And here is the script of the actual launcher:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

sentinel="${HOME}/.config/steamos-session-select"

xexec() {
  local cmd="$1"; shift
  if command -v "$cmd" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    exec "$cmd" "$@"
  else
    echo "Error: required command '$cmd' not found." >&2
    exit 1
  fi
}

choice=""
if [[ -f "$sentinel" ]]; then
  choice="$(tr -d '\n\r' < "$sentinel")"
  rm -f "$sentinel" || true
fi

choice="${choice:-"gamescope"}"

case "$choice" in
  gamescope)
    if command -v gamescope-session-plus >/dev/null 2>&1; then
      unset WAYLAND_DISPLAY
      unset WAYLAND_SOCKET
      unset DISPLAY
      export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=tty
      export WLR_BACKENDS=drm
      export ENABLE_GAMESCOPE_WSI=0
      exec gamescope-session-plus steam
    else
      echo "gamescope-session(-steam) not found in PATH." >&2
      exit 1
    fi
    ;;

  gnome)
    exec gnome-session
    ;;

  *)
    echo "Unknown session choice '$choice' – falling back to GNOME Wayland." >&2
    exec gnome-session
    ;;
esac

When i look at the journalctl output for the error i see what causes the issue is:

xdg_backend: Failed to initialize input thread
Failed to load plugin 'libdecor-gtk.so': failed to init
SDL_Vulkan_CreateSurface failed: VK_KHR_wayland_surface extension is not enabled in the Vulkan instance

And then a core dump. Again, any help would be much appreciated, thanks!!

My stack that matters :

Debian
KDE
Dolphin

I faffed around with running dolphin in admin mode to paste the fonts into the relevant folder before. I wanted to preview the font , and double clicked it. It just asked me if I wanted to install it to system or just this user.

Goddamnit.

Hey, I'm needing some help getting my controller working in game.

It's a Razer Wolverine V2 pro RZ06-0471. It has two switches on the back, I'm using it in 'wireless' (with the 2.4Ghz dongle) and 'PC' mode.

I'm running Fedora 42 with KDE
using steam with proton

Steam recognizes the controller and the device inputs all work fine when I use the input tester in the controller settings on steam. When I open up a game, however, the controller isn't recognized. The glyphs are all showing mouse/keyboard icons.

Edit:

The issue was related to steam having been installed through the discover store (as a flatpak). Uninstalling the flatpak in the discover store, and then installing steam through the terminal (sudo dnf install steam) made the controller be recognized again no problem!

I'm newish to Linux, wondering if you can point me in the direction of an easy way to sync files across devices (Android, Linux, maybe Windows). Internet advice suggests syncthing but recent articles show it was pulled from Android play store. There's is a fork listed there but is that going away too, who knows

What would be some easy alternatives? Nextcloud? Thanks in advance.

And preferably run it as single.sh and dual.sh when I need whichever. It's a Wayland session.

~~(Otherwise I'd have to manually arrange them every time I plug/unplug one of them.)~~

Edit: ~~I also would like to do this without unplugging.~~ Currently, when I disable/enable a monitor, its geometry gets reset.

Edit 2: Unplugging/plugging works, no idea why it didn't work before. However I still would like to do this via scripts because setting monitor setup from super+P also resets the geometry.

Hi folks,

I have a problem, a big problem. I have posted a thread over at the Debian forums, but I'm unfortunately in a hurry (my workstation is bricked) so I'm going to cross-post it here (Skullgrid@lemmy.world kindly redirected me to this community for help).

I'm going to paste the text from the Debian help thread below, hopefully someone has an idea how I can pull myself out of this mess.

Quite a bit has happened, so I'll give you a short version with what I think is essential information, and if you need other details please do ask.

Essentially, I tried getting the nvidia driver on a fresh Trixie install using this tutorial (https://fostips.com/install-nvidia-driver-in-debian-13/). I reached the part where it says "After reinstalled the driver, restart your computer.", that's when the terminal turned blue and told me with big centered text that the free driver (?) was already installed and it's conflicting with the new one I am trying to install, but I just need to reboot in order to solve the conflict. So I rebooted and I was greeted by the following prompt.

This goes nowhere, it never boots into Debian. Thinking I had broken Debian, I thought to myself, no big deal, Debian had an issue anyways (see https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=827488), I'll try another random distro (Bazzite) see if it helps. But after installing Bazzite over Trixie, I got the following prompts at boot :

(this one is a bit blurry, it says "Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation")

If I go for "Continue boot" it just cycles over and over again on these prompts. And I don't know what to make of the other choices here.

I can see it's related to the operation I did with the nvidia driver, but I don't understand how the problem wasn't solved by wiping my drive with another distro ? twice... now I have tried with Nobara as well, only to get the same prompts. How can I solve this issue ? my computer is bricked and I really hope that's fixable. Anyone has a clue ?

Like I said, don't hesitate to ask if there's something I haven't said...

Cheers,

I wanted to move my savegame for Mainframe Defenders from my windows to linux. Unfortunately I was unable to figure out where the game expects the savegame.

Is there some equivalent of Process Monitor to figure out where the game writes my savegame to?

I'm thinking about buying a small budget notebook with a touchscreen for university and running a resource friendly Linux distro on it to extend battery life (and also bc windows and Google suck ass). since I'm pretty much out of my depth here: does that make sense at all? are there noob friendly Linux distros available that support touch screen/ flippable notebooks. and if so, would it also make sense to buy a lenovo chromebook rather than a windows 11 based notebook? thanks in advance!

For years, I've used a Razor Naga with DPI switching on one of the side buttons, and for years before that, it was a Logitech G600. I've just installed Linux for the first time in a while only to realize Razor doesn't offer support, and Polychromatic doesn't offer button remapping.

Is there any way to rebind my mouse, or will I have to go back to Windows to keep using my mouse?

1Edit: plz send help fast. I am typing "1" into every window I open. I need rebind this before I break something.1

Edit21: Is there a way to bind a sensitivity toggle to the mouse button event more directly?

Edit 3: I've run out of time to work on this, so I'll need to install Windows for the time being. I might come back to it if I ever get a weekend free.

Screenshot of my partitions. Partition 1 if EFI, Partition 2 is Mint Boot sector I believe. Partition 3 is everything else.

I'm looking to give OpenSUSE TW and Fedora a try specifically. HD is encrypted from install, and I didn't know to put /home on its own partition.

Plenty of storage space to play with. How should I approach hopping with the least amount of pain and cleanup when I finally figure out where I want to land?

I made this post about a month ago :
https://lemmy.world/post/35450797

And I've successfully gotten off windows 10 (nothing to do with the support, my life finally settled down enough for me to be able to pull the trigger). The journey :

Ubuntu Mate > Plus Studio upgrade > Checking out the Pika live boot > Ripping out Mate and installing KDE > Bazzite > Vanilla ass Debian

For now. If I find any problems I can't overcome, or miss some of the cool features of Pika, I will move to pika and stay there as it's been my favourite complete build. But I have some stories to tell.

Since I was going to all the trouble of backing up all my shit and preparing to start from ground zero, I looked ahead and got a couple distros to go hoppin'. From the recs I had :

• Bazzite
• Pika
• Just stick to ubuntu or derivatives
• And through inference, debian. Because fuck it, since ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives are basically debian+ , and I'm nuking this fucker, might as well try that too. After all, if I can't hack it, I'll just install a different linux.

Backstory time : I've been on linux a few times before, though only ubuntu itself in the late 00s, mint in the mid 10s and dropped out eventually due to hardware failures and whatnot. I'm currently a programmer and both my skills , availability of internet knowledge on linux and accessibility of linux itself, horrificness of the world as a whole have converged to a point where I feel like it's finally time to go back.

The reason why I waited so long for this computer from '18 to have linux on it is that IRL has made me depend on my current computer not shitting a brick. I'm talking migrations etc.

Anyway, story time :

I installed the ubuntu mate I had to hand (wife had some old, slow ass computers that needed it), and off I went to the races. On the Ubuntu Studio site I saw that any version could "become" ubuntu studio through a gui based install pack, so I upgraded that way. I tried to tinker with the GUI to make it a bit more the way I'd like it to be, and got tired of my configs getting nuked every time I didn't save the settings correctly or whatever. I also had to do some tinkering to make it run the GPU in games, and had to fiddle to get some steam games to run properly (Fallout 3, Hunnie Pop) but once I got the graphics card sorted, Haven and Snakey Bus ran quite well.

At the moment my perspective on MATE GUI is that it sucks. It is rock solid and dependable on my wife's daily driver which has been on there for a long while now, ever since her tower got bricked, and more power to anyone who made it work. I couldn't.

Also, shoutout to @spex@lemmy.world for the rtcqs rec, it makes it really easy to check what I need for good sound performance. I was able to configure most of the things I needed and I get good enough peformance (so far) on the systems I try it on.

I'm not sure in which order the next two things happened.

I got bored and fed up of mate, and wanted to move on to the next adventure. for a kick, I decided to try replacing the GUI before I left. I followed some instructions on how to install KDE and some on how to remove MATE. I did it and got surprised at how easy it is. Then I ran signal and found out the encryption keys needed to be switched once I started using KDE, and oh well. 95% win , and I really enjoy KDE. Before, I thought I was more of a gnome guy, and didn't like KDE very much. Now, it's the opposite. KDE 4 lyf, KDE connect is fucking awesome and I haven't even scratched the surface of it.

I tried the liveboot of pika. I REALLY like the hardware manager, and KDE base, and it's promising. I have some doubts about how old the community and whatnot is, but I really like how friendly it seems.

Next, I wanted to try Bazzite, since I wanted to try a gaming OS and one of the recommendations. Install was a bit shaky compared to ubuntu, but I was distracted doing other stuff so for now we'll say it's 50/50 blame wise. I had to do absolutely zero config whatsoever for anything and snakeybus and haven ran perfect from minute zero. I tried to apt install something and it told me that apt was not allowed, and the following on the wiki link it gave :

Fedora Atomic Desktops have read-only root files to prioritize stability. Therefore, containerized applications that do not interfere with your host system will work best.

Package formats ranked from most recommended to least recommended for daily usage:

rpm-ostree (System-Level Packages) - Layer Fedora packages at a system-level (not recommended, use as a last resort)

My gut reaction was "Buddy I'm drunk as I want, and I'll kill this OS with my incompetency if I want". Also, all the investment I felt I had with the minimal command line usage and way I've picked up so far on how to do stuff made me not want to stay on bazzite.

It sounds like I dislike bazzite, or that I don't appreciate the rec, far from it. It made me feel that the main branches of linux (as I see them) of Debian, Fedora, Arch and Gentoo were distinct enough for me to have developed an actual preference for debian itself, instead of just its derived noob friendly forms. Maybe as I get better grips as a programmer and Debian user I'll want to brave Arch and Gentoo ; but at the moment I really , really appriciate getting to try Bazzite/fedora, and seeing that immutable, fedora based OSes are not something that I mesh well with, for now.

Now for the actual fun story that made me want to write this long, boring post.

The next day after installing bazzite, I wanted to move on to the next OS. I figured with the live boot playing I did, if I wanted to settle down, it was going to be with Pika. I really, really like how friendly it is, how explicit it is in GUI about what's being used, what drivers what hardware has, etc etc. So; if I were to try out raw ass debian, this was going to be my shot, as I don't think I'll move off pika if I get on it.

Pop in the USB stick, launch the gui install. The button layouts threw me off a bit (to the point where I was confused about if I had set the wrong resolution) , but it connected to wifi fine, and I eventually got the improved reformatting of the drive done. All right. Maybe it's just the installer, I should be happy to get a friendly enough GUI installer with WIFI capabilities. Finish the install "Remove media and reboot" sure.

System Reboots. All I get is the command prompt as if I'm running dos on a windows 3.1 machine. Da fuq?! Sure enough vanilla ass debian comes with fucking nothing apparently. But, here's the fun part, because I manually decided to rip out MATE before nuking it from orbit, I know that I can just install KDE with no trouble ... hopefully. I have no idea what the fuck else debian didn't come with, maybe I'll have to manually install drivers for everything under the sun too. Reboot again, bam. Sexy KDE UI the way I got used to like a week ago.

Some snags though; the network interface is there, but no wifi... but I'm connected to the internet? Turns out I need to remove the setup for that from somewhere. Gotta install the NVidia drivers, no way to manually select which graphics card is active through gui, but, games seem to be using the 3d card when they need it. Great. Hunnie Pop and Fallout 3 (which didn't run on windows 10 or Ubuntu) are doing great. Snakey Bus and Haven are great too, as usual.

I got some midi input showing through piano booster, but the UI is all fucked up , I used rtcqs and audacity to check multi track recording, however tenacity is fucked (until I try harder with rtcqs to fix the problems it has), I have yet to try OBS, but the fundamentals seem to be there.

For now, I think I can enjoy being on Vanilla Ass Debian at least as a learning experience for a while, especially if I look around for hardware managers similar to pika. If I can't hack it, I have a USB with pika on it ready to go.

I got inspired to write this long ass post because it was funny to me that the raw install of debian has no window manager, and to thank all the people that gave me recs; specifically :

• @spex
• @Tuuktuuk@sopuli.xyz (thanks for reminding me that it's debian all the way down)
• @LostWanderer@fedia.io (thanks for the anti-recommendation of Cachy/Arch
• @TragicNotCute@lemmy.world (Bazzite was worth a shot, not for me, but opened my eyes and really helped see my own capabilites and preferences)
• @janNatan@lemmy.ml (for recommending I try ubuntu anyway, which led me to experimenting more, leading to installing KDE manually)
• @Fizz@lemmy.nz (Pika is GOATed, and if I fail here, I'm moving there forever... hopefully)
• You for reading this

Fuck it, watch a dumb video if you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fVAIZkIV7Q (Dankpods/Dankmus makes a ramshackle computer and shoves bazzite on it)

I am wanting to upload my save file for hollow knight silksong to a progress tracker on the wiki. I have the game on Steam, running it through Proton 9.0-4, and I'm on Fedora 42 KDE Plasma.

Trying to access the location ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/unity3d/Team Cherry/Hollow Knight Silksong/) through Dolphin just gives an "invalid protocol" message.

What should I do?

I know this is a pretty common question, but the Google results don't seem to offer a good solution and are mostly aimed at people who already know Linux.

I am looking to switch from Windows, where I have my OS and whatever big game I'm currently playing on my 128GB SSD, and everything else (games, most software, documents, ect.) on my 2TB HDD. ELI5, How would I replicate this on Linux? I'm planning on installing Mint, but am open to using Bazzite if it offers any additional tools for this sort of this.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/47508691

When my laptop is on battery, the brightness changes depending on what's on the screen.

It changes when I maximize or minimize a window, when I open or close a tooltip, when the visual bell goes off in my terminal, when I move my mouse onto something, when I'm watching a video with no input.

It is extremely annoying and I would like it to stop happening.

All the solutions I have seen only work for a Dell Inspiron with Intel CPU, and mine is AMD.

System stats

Hardware: Dell Inspiron 15 with AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon graphics.

Software: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) with Linux 6.12.43 kernel and KDE Plasma 6.3.6 desktop

When I first began researching Linux, for my needs, I found the number of different Distros to be overwhelming. So I made this flow chart, with the intent to help new users find a starting point for choosing a distribution.

I'm open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.

EDIT: Chart updated based on suggestions in the comments.

If anyone knows if this bug is already being tracked on the KDE bugzilla, or if its been fixed in newer versions, please link it below! :)

So, what's the deal with NumLock? I have it tuned on in the BIOS and in KDE settings, yet every time I boot up my PC or open the terminal as super user, it is turned off. Any way to deal with this? That happened on Bazzite, Fedora and now Cachy. I have a 100% keyboard and I want to use all 100% of it.

Noooooob here: As title said - I don't know what distro I should choose. My needs are student stuff like Libreoffice & Videoconferences but also creative things, photo-management and cutting videos. Does it matter at all? Do I have to check for every single program I use or is there a distro that is recommended?

I was planning on getting a Tuxedo with Tuxedo OS, but my neighbour recommended another "no os"-seller and now I'm not sure. I was opting for Tuxedo mainly because of the support since I'm leaving windows after many years^^

(Picture shows the lilac and blueish ports that we had for mouse and keyboard back "in my days" with the words "How old are you" - "Me:" on top - just because this community semmingly requires a picture added)

https://ubuntustudio.org/

I want something that's stupid easy to install, requires no setup, and has recording and gaming functionality from the beginning. I constantly see people shitting on ubuntu for semi-valid reasons, and I'm open to stable alterantives.

I'm installing it on this laptop :

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/msi-gl62m-7rex-core-i7-7700hq-8gb-1tb-256gb-ssd-15.6-inch-geforce-gtx-105-9s7-16j962-1293/version.asp

NB : This is for mission critical etc laptop. This will be my only daily driver computer, stability is the topmost priority.

BONUS POINTS : If it's debian based so I can run solarus : https://solarus-games.org/