I'm guessing yes, that you have to make a back up of all your files etc. But I figured I'd ask anyway, just in case.
To anyone who's done it, how do you prepare when you change distro?
SteamOS does not work right on most hardware last I heard. They have specific stuff in there for the exact devices they do support (which are only two I think, SteamDeck and another one of these handhelds). It doesn't have all drivers for other hardware and there are even tweaks for the AMD chips that are in those things.
Yeah I did some research and discovered that. I'm going to look into other distros, thanks!
Bazzite is the best option for a SteamOS-like distro.
Personally I've never used SteamOS itself but it looks identical to it from what I've seen and as a PC OS Bazzite is perfectly functional and it's really decent. I prefer Mint and I main that on my laptop myself but I run Bazzite on my handheld and I recommend it.
This came up with another poster not that long ago, so I'm going to re-post my long responses to them as to why I advocate hard for Bazzite, even for desktops. Just making sure to use the desktop image so it doesn't boot into Game Mode like a console/Steam Deck.
A very good read.
All my complaints about Bazzite are just griping from someone with change fatigue who is very rigid in their thinking. I think it's a really great distro and the install process is fantastic - it really sets the bar for other distros. I think most people would love it and I'd like to be able to love it too but I'm just too curmudgeonly and I know it.
But enough about my character flaws. For everyone else, they should absolutely give it a try if they are curious. Also all my gripes are minor compared to my complaints about Microslop. You can't go wrong with Bazzite.
What distro are you using if I may ask ? Why/When did you decide on it ? Currently on Fedora with KDE (and I think happy) after using Mint for about a month.
I'm either a terrible person to ask about distros or I'm perfect to ask as a very average PC user, so take that as you will.
I'm running mint on my laptop and I've got a handheld running Bazzite.
Mint was the default so I landed on that and it was good enough for me so I'm sticking with it because I can't be bothered to hop but I probably would have started at Zorin or PikaOS if I knew what I do now. For the handheld, Bazzite is the no-brainer option because of how it's perfectly suited for compatibility and ease of use. Both distros I started with when I switched to Linux and the pain of switching hasn't been outweighed by the pain of dealing with the small annoyances of staying yet so I doubt I'll be hopping to anything else for the time being.
I'm the most basic Linux user ever.
I used Cinnamon when I was on Mint. I did like cinnamon it was easy to customize which was nice.
Funny enough I dont think I ever used original gnome in a live environment. I considered using Fedora with gnome but my friend recommended KDE (And there are a fuckton of customization options for KDE which is a plus in my book)
I have played around with my friends steam deck, and messed around with it's desktop mode and quite liked it. That's why I initially was like "Hey maybe that might be a fun little experiment to slap it on a laptop." without thinking about things like "it's built around AMD drivers, Dirt Owl you goober"
Bazzite was another one I was thinking of! That or Pop_OS.
If anyone wants to suggest an OS I'm all ears!
Now is not the right time to try Pop_OS. They've just switched from GNOME to their own desktop environment, which is not really ready to go.
Source: I just switched away from Pop_OS to Fedora about a month ago.
Hehehe, hopefully it wasn't too painful a lesson.
Bazzite is very close to SteamOS and the desktop environment is utilitarian but nice. It's very solid.
I think if I was shopping for a new distro I'd take a close look at PikaOS and it seems like it might be up your alley. It appears that it's very good for gaming and it's part of the new Open Gaming Collective initiative so I'd expect that PikaOS is gonna stay on the cutting edge of Linux gaming since there's other really good gaming distros behind the initiative such as Bazzite.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
My current go to is EndeavourOS, it's very intuitive for an Arch (btw) based distro.
fully recommending bazzite too, if you hate it its easy to rebase to other bootc distros without data loss (still backing things up is a good idea regardless)
bazzite is just a braindead distro, its so hard for the user to mess it up and it has a lot of useful scripts in it. also a lot of the devs are queer and they just purged a maintainer that said some transphobic shit
Hey hey hey if I were to give bazzite a look, do you think the KDE or the GNOME version is more suitable for someone like me who is used to Mint?
If you like the Steam Deck, KDE is the desktop environment it uses.
Coming from Mint - I would recommend KDE.
Technically Mint's Desktop Environment, Cinnamon, was originally forked from GNOME 3, but altered to more conventional desktop paradigms.
GNOME 4X has its own unique desktop workflow vision it forces you into, and you can use shell extensions to make it behave like a traditional desktop, but they tend to break often during new releases.
KDE offers a conventional desktop like Cinnamon by default, with many settings to change if you want to fine-tune and personalize your workflow.
it really depends what you prefer imo. personally i like kde more than gnome (mostly cause its more like windows by default) but a ton of apps use gnome's rendering software for themeing. i also tend to prefer kde's suite of apps (krita my beloved). i think cosmic from popos will be the next big thing but its not fully cooked yet
For safety you should back up your files regardless(home directory or whatever is actually important there), but if you have your home and root on separate partitions (and even better separate hard drives) you shouldn't have to restart from scratch. If you do plan on distro hopping and do not have separate partitions it is worth looking into doing that for your next install(honestly think it is a good thing to do generally but it isn't a big deal). Sometimes configs can be messed up between distro's but it is rarely a problem in my experience
Everything particular to you should be in /home/$YourUsername/ so if you back that up you should be able to get up and running again quick
This might show how little I understand about how OS systems work, but wouldn't each distro have a slightly different way they organize storage?
"all your shit is in /home/$YourUsername/" is pretty universal in linuxes.
Good to know!
I am learning! (slowly)
I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how intuitive my experience has been so far. It's still a learning curve, but it's not nearly as convoluted as I thought it would be either.
This is what linux enjoyers are constantly trying to tell people, that it is different but it's actually more straightforward than windows once you get past your existing familiarity.
It's so much better than Windows, I don't see myself going back, even though Windows is what I grew up on.
The only thing that's going to suck is that I'm worried not having experience with Windows 11 is going to embarrass me one day haha.
Don't let users of inferior OSes embarrass you, embarrass them instead
"You still use that garbage? But doesn't it break every week (I suspect Arch is now more stable than Windows 11...) and spy on you?"
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a bear. Please report any suspawcious behaviour.
Yeah, I find myself confused and infuriated when I have to deal with a modern Windows machine. It takes so long to figure out how to do simple things or change a setting. And then you look it up and all the documentation and forums online are useless.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a bear. Please report any suspawcious behaviour.
I'm at the point where if a job requires me to be able to troubleshoot windows then i skip applying for it. I refuse to work with that piece of shit any longer.
The pattern I have had is to keep my home directory on a separate hard drive so.I can hop and all my stuff (and configurations!) Stay constant across distros. The config side can cause some grief, depending on what you have set up, but the rest is 100% worth it
You have come so far and we're all really proud of you
I only posted that comment to tease you because I'm a recalcitrant little shithead and you said not to suggest Linux (plus I think it's funny speaking as if Linux is the plural of Linuc) but look at you now!
From memory you were sick to death of Windows (relatable) and you were sorta on the fence about what to do but you explicitly said not to tell you to switch to Linux and, as the classic supportive community that is Hexbear, everyone in the replies was bullying you to switch to Linux.
Show
That's kind of what I like about you guys though. I do need to be pushed sometimes.
Here's a pretty good vid explaining the Linux filesystem if you really wanna dig into it. I think it covers some differences between distros, too IIRC.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You should back up your files when making a major change to your computer, regardless of if it shouldn't cause problems (you should back up your files routinely anyway; hard drives fail).
On your next install, if you put /home in its own partition, that'll make distro hopping easier (you should STILL back up your shit sometimes though). This can sometimes be more jank than a clean install though, because programs put their config files in /home, and oops your new distro has an older version of whateverthefuck that gets confused by the newer config file.
Some things to check out when hopping:
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Mint is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian. I think it's worth exploring that tree.
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Try things with different desktop environments. Mint is Cinnamon, but a lot of people like KDE. There's also Gnome, XFCE, random shit. You can swap these around to some extent, but a distro with KDE is going to have KDE apps pre-installed and give a more consistent KDE experience.
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Try a tiling window manager! Some people love those fuckers.
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Sick of Debian? Try Fedora or an Arch-based distro like Cachy or Majaro.
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Arch btw? Arch boots to a black screen and expects you to install it yourself via terminal and wiki. Hilarious.
Sick of Debian? Try Fedora or an Arch-based distro like Cachy or Majaro.
i would not recommend manjaro, the devs have fucked up way too many times
for a friendly arch i would recommend endeavourOSArch btw? Arch boots to a black screen and expects you to install it yourself via terminal and wiki. Hilarious.
the install script is pretty easy now
it's text based and ugly as sin but it will get you a working arch setup without having to punch in commands from the wikiYeah, I know nothing about Arch, I just took the top two Arch-based ones off distrowatch.
Listen to the Horse not the Owl on this one, folks.
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Generally speaking yes you wipe your partitions and start over and restore selectively from backups. I recommend backing up /home and /etc (and maybe /boot) and test your backups by stimulating a restore (e.g. to a dir at /home/restore, just see if it is the right size and has your files). If you don't have a regular backup system, this is a good opportunity to start using one. I like borg-based tools and filesystems that can do snapshots. Then you just make a backup right before you install the new distro, then restore from backup.
You can also start putting /home on its own partition in case you swap distributions often but I've never found this appealing. It's also not a replacement for proper backups. I do set up /home to be discretely snapshotable, though.
Why are you looking to change from Mint? Mint is pretty nice, though I prefer Debian for that kind of distro. I've been trying out guix and really like it, though it's definitely a power user / dev distro, as you have to configure your system using a dialect of Lisp (a programming language).
Mint is great! I'm just curious mostly.
I might even just like duel boot and decide I want to stick with mint lol
wait a minute... THERE A MULTIPLE WAYS OF SPELLING DUAL?!
WHAT IS ENGLISH?!
Two operating systems fighting each other to see who gets to run
Yeah that's basically what it comes down to.
Usually windows wins because Linux is too weak and doesn't dare to wreck other OSs boot images.
Nice! You can also try out distributions with just a usb stick, though they will be slower than an SSD.
I'm somewhat new to Linux, too, but I have a dedicated hard drive partition for my OS. Had to do a reinstall recently (bricked my PC during the Arch NVIDIA debacle), all I did was wipe that partition and literally everything was ready to go on my data partition once I reinstalled. It should make hopping easier.
personally i just go ahead and nuke everything since it's easier lol, all my really important stuff is backed up to cryptomated cloud storage and everything else i can download again since it's all free/pirated/"owned" software and videos
i feel like some people actually do make scripts to back up all their config files and whatever, at a minimum you might want to copy your home folder to a USB drive and manually look through it to restore the files you want after installing the new distro
To anyone who's done it, how do you prepare when you change distro?
I backup my home folder (home/UserName/) and if swapping to a new "family" of linuxes (like from a debian-based one to an arch based one) note down the names of any packages i definitely want to keep using and checking if the new one has it in their repos
I cast aside my earthly data possessions and start again as if I am born anew. I have automated backup scripts for everything i care about and provisioning scripts for a bunch of distros to get me started in most things.
Come join me on Fedora. We love it over here tips me hat
You basically back up /home and maybe /etc/fstab if you're using the same exact device with multiple drives but don't want to set up your drive partitions again. If your device only has one physical drive, there's no point in keeping /etc/fstab since the new distro installation would just create a new /etc/fstab anyways. Backing up /etc/fstab starts making sense if you have like a PC with 6+ physical drives. You could technically just set up all 6 drives through the installer, but I personally would never do that. Whenever I install an OS, I always physically disconnect every single drive except for the drive that the OS is going to. Otherwise, you run into the risk of installing the OS on the wrong drive, wiping data from that drive in the process.
