Edit: I think there are better answers downthread than mine, but I hope my first comment spurned them on.

Not the most experienced bash guru at it but let me see…

• does the while condition have to be within [ ] brackets?
• Also I can’t figure out what your condition is, it seems to have an unclosed quotation mark.
• Most bash while-do-done loops I’ve made have a comparator like -ne for not equal or -le for less or equal to. So for example: while [ $variable -ne 5 ]; do

Bazzite is a great distro if you want to jump in and start playing games and getting the software you need to use your computer. The intent behind bazzite seemed to me that it should be accessible enough for non-technical users but provide access to a large library of programs in just a few clicks. It has a few quirks that make it different than other Linux distros if you pick it apart.

Have you ever used command prompt, batch scripts or PowerShell on Windows? That’s what BASH, shell scripting or ‘the terminal’ is equivalent to on Linux (and mac sorta). It’s the virtual scalpel you can use to tinker, fix, control, or totally screw up your system. If you don’t have important data to lose, then feel free to just try whatever and learn from mistakes you make along the way. If not, then backups are your friend, and be EXTRA careful doing anything as the root user (that’s the admin account with total access over the operating system) or any command like sudo (it might even lecture you about it once)

For self-hosting, if you have a spare machine you can just try experimenting on it to your heart’s content. If your search-engine skills are good enough then you should be able to fumble your way through install instructions or tutorials. Another alternative is you could rent a VPS and optional domain for <$90/year, which then you can learn about SSH (secure shell) and fiddle with a computer remotely for fun.

People here can probably give you advice or support, if there’s a specific problem you’re having and you’ve couldn’t figure it out from the documentation and search.

If they don’t pay, go, tell it on the mountain, that Musky MAGA stiffs your pay.

Awww, he should ask Copilot why people don’t find AI impressive.

The community URL is still !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz (so https://sh.itjust.works/c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz for you), which won’t be easy for people to remember if they are trying to mention the steam hardware community. At the moment community and user handles can’t be changed on Lemmy (though the display name can be set to anything).

I think the comm name and display name not matching will make it a bit confusing for people to post to…

I suggest calling it “Steam Deck and Hardware discussion”

Not on purpose in the way you are suggesting… he tried it all on his own in earnest, but made a dumb mistake not reading the prompt carefully enough or trying to understand it. But, he only got into that situation because of an error on Pop OS! maintainers’ part. It was an unknown issue at the time until he uncovered it. OCAU thread that discussed the issue at the time

I love the fact that Ubuntu, Redhat and SUSE are competing for long term enterprise support. The philosophy “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rings true, Linux enterprise deployment business make more revenue and the update backports and security backport fixes help the wider community too.

I tried it out and challenged myself not to touch the terminal to fix anything for as long as I could, to see if it is a truly ready-out-of-the-box experience.

It is actually very intuitive for gaming, what makes it feel more suited than most distros for me is that flatpak apps that you don’t have installed show up in the start menu, ready to add if you need them. Other OSs are leaner and cleaner but you’d have to know the package name.

I managed to get everything started, games and stuff including minor tweaks, and the first time I needed to use the terminal was to work out how to get some fan control working. I didn’t succeed in setting it up. So I took away from that experience that low level hardware OS tasks are harder to access in Bazzite.

I think much of the gatekeeping is over concern that if you mess up, you could unknowingly be allowing a sophisticated hacker to access all the data on your network, without any obvious signs. And maybe some people don’t want to field noob questions like “I clicked something and now the GUI gives a 😕 and doesn’t work anymore, what do I do?”.

There is a skill floor, I would say similarly that you wouldn’t be ready to install Linux yourself if you don’t get suspicious when a .iso download gives you a .exe file instead.

I think Yunohost is a decent solution for beginners that avoids as much of the nitty-gritty as possible. Louis Rossman has made a massive guide that’s about as close as an IKEA step-by-step as you can get with this stuff. We should be encouraging people to learn, but there is a sense of reticence to have people get too in over their heads due to cybersecurity reasons.

Edit: linked the guide

How does one effort without effort?

Sounds like a Personal Computer of Theseus. Nobara is great, it’s a one person project dedicated towards making gaming and streaming easy.

Hey the Steam deck counts. That’s one more Linux device for prospective game developers to target.

CAD is still one area needing development, for sure.

Haven’t tested these myself, but after a brief search, timekpr and little-brother are packages I found you could try, related to session time management.

Glad to hear from someone on the receiving side of recommendations to switch, and that it is going well for you.

Impressive that you were able to pull off the migration for a corporate usecase.

Thanks for this writeup. CAD is one of the several professional workflows that I really wish could work better on Linux, but it is hard to compete against software that costs thousands per year per license.

Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?

So generally Linux has relied on having open and auditable code to avoid exploitation of bugs and ones found can be easily discovered, reported and mitigated. The variety of configurations makes it much less appealing for hackers as an attack surface. So for the average user the biggest danger to breaking your device is yourself (but very occasionally the package manager messes something up too). ClamAV is one antivirus application Linux has…

But depending on what threats you want to mitigate here is what else you can look into:

• Protection against random unwanted internet connections to your computer: UFW (firewall)
• Protection against anyone besides you remotely SSH-ing to your machine (SSH is often disabled by default): fail2ban, strongly encrypted keys
• Protection against physical access of your disk, and data and OS: LUKS (disk encryption)
• Protection against other computer users (or yourself by accident) messing with important parts of the system: SELinux (trusted environment). Most users don’t need this for their personal PC.
• Protection against code you got off github from nuking your computer: flatpak (containerized app), docker (containerized environment), firejail (sandbox environment).

I think GNOME 3 was intended to be nicer for touchscreens but it’s not my favourite either.

My daily driver is MATE - the spiritual continuation of GNOME 2.

Thanks. I figured Microsoft trying to force people off Windows 10 might be a bigger reason than ever to get people to switch than philosophical ones. I wanted to see if that was true for people on Lemmy or if there were other reasons, hence I made this post.

I think the hardest to get on Linux is those in the middle with a very specific piece of hardware or software that needs to work in a certain way. Kind of like the bell curve meme, total computer beginners and total computer experts can embrace linux the easiest.

For like a good chunk of people, all you need from a computer the news, online videos, one social media, email, banking, simple writing and printing. Linux does fine and some distros actually do better than Windows at the basics.