I'd like to use Linux but...

If you used an encrypted filesystem in the VM image, sure.

using Oracle virtualbox

koogs, would you have a smaller swap for an SSD?

no idea. all the schemes i knew for sizing these things were relevant in the days of MBs of RAM, not GBs.

but it was more the limited writes of ssds that has me worried - isn't the swap partition written to more frequently than other parts of the disk, which would suggest it'd wear out sooner. yeah, i know, wear levelling algorithms in the hardware and all. would be interesting to know.

here's something: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

but even that seems outdated given

"High RAM and high disk space With 2 GiB RAM and 100 GB hard disk, use 2 GiB for swap since hard disk space is plentiful."

and neither 2GB ram nor 100GB HDD is particularly "high" imo

in 2013 nobody really knows how big to make a swap partition

It was ever thus

was always HALF RAM, or maybe TWICE RAM (i forget). but then ram and disk became orders of magnitude cheaper and faster and more available, maybe to the point where things just don't swap out anymore. (also, a lot of linux machines are now single user so there are fewer processes running)

I jsut spent the morning screwing with shared folders with virtual box/mint linux and -I failed

shared between virtual box and the host? have had trouble with that in the past. it works for one combination of guest additions / kernel and then you update and it all breaks. i ended up using a samba share, effectively copying everything over the network even though it's the same disk.

am several minor versions behind with box virtualbox and ubuntu but am sticking with something i know works.

Booting my raspberry pi for the first time right now. I used Linux as my only OS from 2002 til 2006 but haven't really touched it since so this feels strange.

I coudl not understand what to put for mountpoint in the command line or for that matter what tp put for share - I did get usb integration to work for moving files out of virtual machine to host but that crashed my whole pc - so I guess it idd not realy work

Update. It worked and I got nice German pop files.

What is a "nice German pop file?"

i've comitted to running linux as my main os after about 8 years and glad to see everything is still a pain in the ass

at least my wireless card works out of the box they fixed that i guess

Let us know what else still sucks

* fontconfig
* unity
* kde plasma
* amarok/banshee/rhythmbox

Mint with Mate is my preferrence, once you've aliased all the forked apps back to their original names (caja? Atril? Wtf?)

And audacious, the winamp of the Linux world, does everything I need in a player.

the proprietary nvidia driver has been nothing but a headache, seriously considering just using my integrated chip

* plymouth boot splash in low resolution with glitched graphics
* the contents of a window when dragging in gnome 3 is choppy
* screen blinks when starting xscreensaver and each time it draws an image in webcollage
* it appears i can only use sddm, since lightdtm and gdm do not seem to be able to load the driver in time

on the plus side i figured out a good fontconfig, liberation fonts + no hinting + lcdfilter; fonts in firefox are no longer giant and fonts in chromium no longer tiny. settled on lollypop as a music player, since it's the closest to "what i want in a player". i would be using gnome-music since that looks very nice, but their album view is sorted by album name, not by artist then album/year. wtf? who wants that? might submit a patch to add sorting options

lol did you guys see that the Windows 10 update will have linux binary support for developers? not meant as a deployment or server platform, but it's native support to the point where you can use the Ubuntu package management and install the same binaries

it's just all routed through a driver/dll that translates linux system calls to windows system calls

so no support for anything other than the command line, but... no more fucking with cygwin

havent had to use windows in ages but cygwin was the bane of my existence when i did. tech looks pretty cool and i'm interested to see how far both parties take this

it's a good fully half-assed solution instead of unsupported half-assed solutions

perhaps a 3/4-assed solution

terrible battery usage for some reason
sound is bad on any type of video playback
zx spec emulator Fuse won't go 3x display, it does on Windows.
larger font on Firefox bookmarks, meaning they don't all fit on screen

I love it otherwise! :)

btw this is through Ubuntu unity so I might switch to Mint based on comments above.

unity is going away, not sure what'll replace it, maybe gnome 3.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/04/ubuntu-unity-is-dead-back-to-gnome/

Yeah unfortunately I found that out three seconds after the installation had completed. My fault for being so hasty.

Can you recommend some good free linux tutorial places? I have been using Linux Academy for about a month just to learn the basics of the Terminal commands and overall structure of linux. It's really helped but alas budget means I can no longer afford the monthly fee.

There's a good terminal walk-through here (though it is geared towards Mac, but a lot of concepts will carry over to any Unix-style system):
http://furbo.org/2014/09/03/the-terminal/

Is there a particular Linux-related application or project you're interested in?

great news re: unity

i don't use linux on my personal computer anymore but still use it a lot at work (usually as a VM, strictly via command line). reading the last few pages of posts on this thread about how rhythmbox, unity etc still being shit is making me laugh/cry

it is quite crazy to me how mainstream linux has become in corporate / cloud world given how it was kinda a "rebel" thing many aeons ago. not knowing at least the basics can seriously hold you back these days.

lol did you guys see that the Windows 10 update will have linux binary support for developers? not meant as a deployment or server platform, but it's native support to the point where you can use the Ubuntu package management and install the same binaries

damn that is pretty nice. when i first started at my current job, i was forced to use a windows laptop for the first few years and yeah cygwin is the pits.

I'm using it right now to tweak around with configuration schemes while waiting for a virtual machine to get provisioned, pretty good

it's kind of ridiculous, if you don't have another version of the bash installed, typing "bash" from the normal windows command line will launch you into the steps to enable developer mode and download the compatibility layer

I have it installed, the only thing I've played on it is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (ascii mode)

which it handles v well indeed tbf

(yes there is a native Windows version so I don't know why I did that, except that I installed the bash/Ubuntu subsystem for Windows, didn't know what to do with it, then thought "lol sudo apt-get crawl amirite")

if it can save me from the bash that comes with git for Windows it may be worth it but after several months I haven't got that far yet (also git-bash may have improved since last time I installed git on Windows)

Tbh I just use git bash on Windows and yes it has got a lot better even in the last year or 2

it's pretty decent, yeah

I may just resent all things bundled with git for Windows since the time long, long ago when it 1. installed some ancient long-deprecated version of Perl 2. silently overwrote my PATH to point to the ancient version

and I didn't notice for a few weeks until I ran some work script which I hadn't changed but it suddenly couldn't cope with utf-8 and I was deeply puzzled

it doesn't do that any more either and hasn't for years but that was a bad enough day to cause long-lasting grudges

Yeah it warns you about the path stuff now and you don't need that option anyway

ffs apparently it's impossible to update my Ubuntu 17 to 18, I have to reinstall the os from nish.

unnacceptable.

(AND THATS WHY)

Does anyone know about this shit?

Windoze has stopped talking to the internet, so I thought I'd give ubuntu a go, not ideal but it'll fill a gap. Installed it, it worked fine, for a day, then stopped booting (would stall at a screen full of text). Tried some fixes but in the end went for the full reinstall and now I just don't get the option to dual boot, it goes straight to windows. I've reinstalled again, deleted the old install and reinstalled, terminated the partition with extreme prejudice and reinstalled, purged and reinstalled grub2 from the ubuntu usb. Nothing. Fuck windows, fuck linux, fuck all computers.

/\
me with every linux installation ever

the uefi secure boot thing often gets in the way of "real" dual booting. to boot into windows (once a month, mostly to pick up new kindle purchases) i now have to stab the f2 button to get the bios options and change it from legacy to uefi.

(this is mint, ubuntu might be different) but see if there's a simlar bios option.

Windows 10 was pissing me off (automatic updates restarting my laptop, and taking out all my wifi logins with it) so I thought about switching to Linux, as a baby step towards it I tried installing a VM running Mint (I think using VMWare or something), but it would only display in a tiny window and it was really unclear how to fix that (I tried something from StackOverflow and it didn't work). basically it didn't work properly straight out of the box and I just gave up on it. Fuck computers OTM

dang ledge. Make sure you're on legacy mode and not UEFI and try this https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

Poo, boot from USB will give a better test than a VM.

All the same,yeh,friggin machines

ta for the tips, no joy yet though. f12 brings up a boot menu but choosing legacy or uefi makes no diff. tried installing grub2 from windows but there's a multiplicity of options (uefi? legacy? which drive for boot drive?), maybe i just haven't hit the right one ;_;

one odd thing, when i purged grub2 (maybe a mistake but hey ho, i'm just trying to figure this out as i go, had never heard of grub2 or efi partitions till yesterday) the directory i removed on the efi partition was called ubuntu; now however i try to install it that directory never appears.

i think it's time to... reinstall windows!

well it's good at telling the boot sector what's what!

brutal experience... if you ever go for it again, set Legacy from the go. It can matter what it was when you did the installing..if memory serves

Linux mint seems to have trouble with recognising hardware. Can't get it to recognise my digital camera and it has not recognised internal hard drives.
Windows at least used to automatically connect to both most of the time.

So have wondered what other OSes there are available.
Had windows 7 up until a couple of months ago. Had gone for that intentionally over 10 cos I didn't like that when windows updated to it a couple of years back. But 7 is no longer supported.

Having a lot of hassle with mint though.

I think I picked Mint because it was supposed to be easy for Windows users. lol?

Dual booting is such a pain in the ass, buy a $100 used laptop from your local computer nerd repair shack and try Linux on that imo.

I have a six and a half year old laptop that started off as Win 8, then upgraded to Win 10, then dual boot Win 10 / Ubuntu. I'm pretty sure that continual Win 10 updates killed the drive, so after I replaced it with an SSD, I made it Ubuntu only.
I have a desktop computer that I occasionally use that is also dual boot Win 10 / Ubuntu. For some reason GRUB thinks that the Win 10 installation is actually Win 8 and it hangs the computer when I select it. But I can still boot directly to Win 10 by setting that partition as the default in the BIOS. Whatever. Windows still sucks after all these years.