Tonight I am installing Kubuntu on the gfs machine. Once she is comfortable with that, and the support ends for our version prolly going with Debian. Going to remove her windows drive (256 or 512GB) as there is only 1 m.2 port on the board, and replace it with a 1tb.

Her needs are simple, make Logitec G13 work (works and tested on my machine for months), Make ESO and addons work (Lutris has its own installer for ESO YAY! Minion has a linux version.), and minecraft java (found in app manager).

Now, she has some knock off razor mouse with buttons under the thumb, maybe the razorx software or whatever it’s called will work on her mouse?, this may be a slight pain point. I am hoping this will work out and she will be happy with her (new) pc, we are preserving her windows as a fall back if she hates it. I have a short video lined up to teach her the linux file system. She won’t be doing anything command line, for now, except to start the G13. Gonna leave her with the dolphin file manager as it is difficult to get elevated privileges compared to nautalis(sp?) where it is a simple checkbox click. Anything else to suggest here?

I can mostly teach her what she needs to know as we go, she is a smart cookie and has picked up everything I taught her for windows and networking so far so should not be an issue for her, but if you guys have any suggestions on tutorial vids for non power users or other things I can do to make this even more seamless it would be appreciated.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    0·
    20 hours ago

    Thoughts as someone who’s migrated two gfs and one wife:

    • Don’t consider distrohopping. Install something that can be maintained for 10 years through upgrades. If you go with Kubuntu, stay with Kubuntu. If you’re planning on Debian go straight to Debian and do the extra work to make it comfortable.

    • Plan the install to be dumbproof and trivial to maintain. E.g. no separate partitions for this or that which could run out of space. If you need separate /boot, oversize it. You don’t want to deal with failed updates due to space.

    • Install a Windows VM for all the corner cases you aren’t thinking of at the moment. Share the home dir with Windows under some drive like Z: and teach her to use it. Use built-in hypervisor like virt-manager. It doesn’t have 3D acceleration but it’s problem-free when it comes to upgrades over time since there aren’t kernel module compilations.

    • Use web “apps” liberally to fill the gaps where native apps are missing.

    • Don’t use external repositories unless absolutely needed. You want updates and upgrades trivial and boring.

    You want to show that this system is better than Windows. Any issues and defects would be counted against it even if it was your fuckup. So go boring, trivial and stable.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
      0·
      15 hours ago
      1. Yes agreed, why reinstall?
      2. Dont ever use fixed partitions, that is not how you do things. One boot partition 3G or so to not run out of space, the rest with BTRFS encrypted. Or anything else in an LVM.
      3. Use virt-manager for that, dont get virtualbox. No weird kernel modules. I am curious how you share the directory, didnt get that working.
      4. Yeah, might need ungoogled chromium for them to be actual webapps as Firefox is weird
      5. THIS. People always do this and mess everything up. Use flatpak.
      6. Boring? In a sense, but that is kinda difficult to say.

      I would recommend HeliumOS with Flatpak apps. Way more stable than any package based distro

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        0·
        14 hours ago

        Use virtiofs. There’s a driver for Windows. Very fast. We use it in production with a different hypervisor and Linux VMs. Different client driver but I suppose the Windows driver should be fine too.

    • lost_faith@lemmy.caOP
      0·
      20 hours ago

      Yeah, simple as possible. She has 2 drives (a new 1tb m.2 and iirc a 1 or 2tb platter) and that will be the extent of partitions, I even stopped doing partitions on my systems this time around. I didn’t plan on doing a vm, now I just might, (is there a container or something ready to dl? I seem to recall reading that a bit ago. Iit has been a long time since I used a vm, is it possible to clone her active windows into a vm?) her proprietary needs are simply G13, ESO and Minecraft, the rest as you say are web based. HELL no to external repos, except the G13 one, I certainly do want it simple for her. Over the past 4 months I’ve been scrutinizing the updates before running em and have had 1 issue with FF but the rest has been a dream.

      As I said I’m leaving her a rip cord in case she just doesn’t like it, I don’t see her having issues after a week of use.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        0·
        16 hours ago

        Oh on the partitioning side, you probably want LVM with Btrfs on top. LVM makes expansion, migration very easy. Could even turn a single drive into raid later on without much difficulty. Btrfs gives you data integrity checksumming.

        • lost_faith@lemmy.caOP
          0·
          15 hours ago

          Oh yeah! Meant to do that on mine, ext4 is what I am using, but yeah she will get btrfs as timeshift suggested it when I finally activated it last month

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
            0·
            15 hours ago

            I mean, what you really want long-term is ZFS but the setup becomes significantly less trivial and docs aren’t nearly as abundant and LVM+Btrfs gives you a good subset of the benefits. I recently converted my laptop to ZFS on root and I can now do lightning-fast backups of the system while it’s running.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        0·
        18 hours ago

        Look for the massgravel github repo. Has links to Windows images and activator. If you use the IoT ones, they’re clean from all the standard Windows cruft. You can probably migrate the existing Windows install but it would be more work. Don’t have a doc on it to link.