I personally don’t understand why that command doesn’t run every time the system starts up by default, I wrote a script that ran it on startup years ago and I can’t tell you how many times it tells me that there were files that needed repairing.
Dual boot isn’t that bad if you just use separate drives; the issue is only with Windows and Linux on one drive.
This is only true if you boot Windows by switching the boot order in your bios, if you boot windows through grub or systemdboot, it is liable to overwrite files. That being said, keeping them on separate drives removes all but the afformentioned issue, so I would still highly recommend doing so if you plan on dual booting.
After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.
This is the response I normally get as well, which infuriates me to no end, because it isn’t an actual reason, it is ultimately their decision, and I feel like they are making a mistake out of laziness or perceived comfort.
They shouldn’t start with arch if they don’t want to learn how the system works, endeavor os or cachy os would be my go to’s for arch
On occasion I have broken it to the point that I needed to chroot from live USB, but I just chroot and sudo pacman -Syu a couple of hours later and everything sorts itself out. And even if that sounds like a hassle, I can tell you every issue was hardware, I was running endeavor on a USB (not a live env) which is not something I would recommend, because pacman degrades flash memory integrity very quickly, and the only other times I broke it badly enough had to do with nvidia drivers
Since you are going the dual boot route, I highly recommend that you keep the OS’s on separate drives and never use systemd, or GRUB boot for windows, ie always switch your boot order in your uefi. This is mainly because there are countless formatting and system repair issues with using one drive, and regardless of where the OS’s are, windows has a strong tendency to overwrite your Linux bootloader.
I also do some video/photo stuff, which don’t have Linux-native versions. I use Affinity (v2 and the newly-released version), Magix Vegas, and Wondershare Filmora. I don’t know if it’d be possible to run any of them in a virtual machine or something. I have tried the Linux-native alternatives, and while they have their merits, I won’t be able to use them as full replacements.
The unfortunate thing is if this is non-negotiable, I think this will kill your Linux dreams at the moment. At the moment, the only ways I know how to run these well is on a VM with GPU pass through which is a pain for people who have tinkered with Linux for ages and damn near system breaking for the average user.
Now, perhaps unusually for a newbie, when it comes to wanting something I’m familiar with, I’m actually not bothered by having an envirnment which resembles Windows. In fact, I think it’d probably be a plus if the distro does things differently. It’s fun to try different things, and if someone’s genuinely thought “this is a better way of doing this”, then I’m happy to give it a go. As long as there’s decent documentation. I’m not allergic to the idea of the terminal or otherwise having to use typed commands (I have a Raycast-ish-like app on Windows which I use to launch apps and search for files, for example), but I’m also not very experienced with that and would need very good, very newbie-friendly documentation.
If the previous part isn’t a deal breaker, based upon this part of your post, I would highly recommend running endeavor os or cachy os which are both run on an arch base. My preferred of the two is endeavor since it is essentially just a base arch install without the hassle that is installing arch. Using one of these distros will require you to familiarize yourself with the package manager pacman and the aur wrapper that they use, but that is the extent of CLI interaction that is needed. This will allow you to have a hassle free install while having the tinkering capabilities that arch is known for, just don’t touch anything that requires sudo without making sure you understand what it is doing.
I think you’ll be disappointed, the zorin boost is due to their marketing as Windows esque, I believe they just tell people how they are like windows. Extrapolating downloads for more linuxy distros from one that is supposed to be windows:Linux edition is not going to work out very well.
I’m not all too familiar with mass grave, but it does seem like a similar loophole to the win11 updates without TPM 2.0, in that it works but ms doesn’t want it to, so you may run into the issue of your system bricking or ms holding your data hostage. Also as far as I can decipher ltsc only fixes the security issue, as far as I am aware the one drive push is still there regardless of version.
All in all, I believe that there are workarounds, but if ms is so keen on making it this hard to stay on win 10 I would rather just take the adjustment period to a Linux distro.
There are two massive hoops as far as I am concerned, no local account & ms office forcing the use of one drive. I know these arent that big of an issue for most people, but I will never do either of those things.
Based upon your wording, I am assuming your father is not particularly tech savvy, if this is the case first and foremost you should be picking a distro that is maintained by a large group of trustworthy developers, this removes the niche distros from the running. Secondly, since he isn’t going to want to learn the terminal, you should be picking a distro that installs programs with a GUI package manager or flatpak manager, this removes the likes of arch, gentoo, & open suse tumbleweed. Thirdly, you will want a distro that is based on one you understand well enough to run tech support, I don’t know which that is for you, if it is Debian based stick with mint, fedora based go with fedora workstation or fedora KDE, if it is opensuse I don’t have any recommendations sorry.
After you select the distro you need to educate your dad that he should only be getting new programs through the package manager, and I would either tell him the inherit insecurity of some flatpaks or remove flathub from your mirror list unless there is something he really needs in which case you need to do your research.
In general security on Linux is a lot more active for IT than it is for Windows, but for the general user if they can get by using a well known distro’s repos you shouldn’t have any security issues.
If you are overly worried you could add apparmor to the system to isolate the system from programs or pick an immutable distro like bazzite, but in general the immutables are smaller teams which is why I don’t prefer them.
You seem to be a bit more advanced than I am, I have only ever used kritas version of smart objects, & perspective distort, but I don’t know about the others you mentioned.
The only one I’m aware of requires a GPU with 6Gb of vram, which sadly I do not have, I would very much like a background removal utility that is run locally
The only one I’m aware of requires a GPU with 6Gb of vram, which sadly I do not have, I would very much like a background removal utility that is run locally
Don’t forget krita, as far as I am concerned they have feature parity with Photoshop, so long as you have no interest in ai features
This was news to me, I will now be spending an afternoon trying to fix my self hosting setup in the near future
Sadly, my ISP charges an arm and a leg for anything other than dhcp
So long as you know that is the trade off, I would tend to agree with you, but knowing the standard desktop user, most will opt for the opposite of your statement.
I am unfamiliar with refind, but from my experience with systemd & grub dual boot, if you do not change your boot order in bios, there is a high chance that the windows boot manager will brick your Linux one, even across drives. My advice for dual booting is to ditch the convenience of using one boot manager. But once again, this may not be an issue you have.
You could put him on to cachy os, iirc it has graphical package management and is built on arch.