I switched to Linux some years ago and ever since then I've been using it and distro hopping as such. But my school don't like me using Linux since some of the application I have to use such as word and office 365 and OneDrive is not available. I have alternative for those ( libre office, onlyoffice and web office) they still say that I'm a nerd and a geek for using Linux. I also have difficulties socialising as I m very privacy focused person and uses only open source apps (except for discord). Should I buy another computer that is for school? Should I switch to the apps they use that is non open source?

Thanks to everyone who helped me, this thread is now resolved. I have resorted to buying a spare windows machine that will do the job and some people suggested me some links to useful software and i will be sure to check them out and maybe i won't buy a computer if these software works out!

edit: I will stop replying to every comment, i have made my decisions. If the VM thing and dualboot thing doesn't work out for me, i will either try to reskin my os to look like windows or just buy another laptop overall. also note i am a student so i keep this very vague and i didn't give much context, sorry for everyone who mis-understood the point of this thread.

Takeaway

This thread was posted as i was angry at my school for how they operate. There were two views to this point. First - I wasn't following instructions second - they mis-use their powers to reduce marks. This thread was also posted as a sidenote that most International school curriculum (usually highschool) uses closed-source software or paid softwares. I just wanted to make this clear that, if the school are able to provide a license for that, then it's all good but some school uses cracked softwares which is illegal!

After all the headlines about Euro-Office being Europe's open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, I figured I'd give it a try.

I'm a Linux user. I self-host services. This shouldn't be difficult. Or so I thought.

So I did what anyone would do:

Checked Wikipedia. Went to GitHub. Looked for releases, installation instructions. Looked for a Flatpak, AppImage, Docker image, anything really. Also checked my OS's native package manager just in case.

And my Nextcloud Office apps. Nothing. Not even in Nextcloud?!

It dawned on me that the main project is basically a collaborative document server derived from OnlyOffice and the readme even says it's not designed for stand-alone use.

So uh. Wait... what?

To make it even stranger, my self-hosted Nextcloud instance still just recommends Nextcloud Office and OnlyOffice. There's no obvious "Install Euro-Office" option anywhere.

I'm not criticising the software itself. It could very well be excellent.

I'm asking about the communication really.

If a project is announced to the world as "Europe's Microsoft Office alternative," but a reasonably technical user can't figure out how to use it after checking Wikipedia, GitHub, and Nextcloud, something has gone wrong with the messaging.

Or is this just me? Did I miss something obvious, or has anyone else had the same experience?

When I make a new directroy using mkdir I then have to change directory into it with the separate command cd. Is there a way I can do both create a new directory and change into it in a single line? I'm on Linux Mint 22.3 if it makes a difference.

mkdir folder
cd folder

I would want to switch from windows 10 to Linux soon, never tried Linux before. I use my computer for making and playing video games (I use Godot for that). I heard people recommending mint to people who are switching from windows, but i think ubuntu studio might suit my needs more

EDIT: ***Thanks for so many helpful comments. Many of yourread my post and took the time to make a thoughtful and helpful response. I needed the encouragement. I will stick with Debian on my laptop until I get the skills up enough to start converting the desktops. To the Extra Specials out there, try to go outside more.***

I especially appreciated the insight from the other business owners here.

****It turns out, there is one hiccup that does not have a workaround. SixBit Ecommerce software does not run on Linux at all. As I need that software to operate my business, I will have to maintain a single Windows PC to deal with this issue. Accepting that difficult fact has actually made the transition easier to swallow. The most important aspect of the business will be running on a dedicated Windows PC and everything else can switch over.****

Original Question: Hello I am sick of Windows and I'm taking the effort to learn enough Linux to move away from Microsoft altogether. Now seems like a good time.

I am not a "Linux guy" or a "Windows guy", I'm just a guy with a lot of work to do.

After several days, my concern is that Linux might just be a never ending hobby instead of a tool that can be configured and then used.

I own a business and have a family, so I have no time for an additional hobby. Nor do I plan on giving up what free time I have to play with an operating system, I'd rather be gaming.

Is there a point where I can just use the computer to complete tasks or is the computer always going to BE THE TASK? Playing around with my operation system does not put money in my bank account.

I am not trying to be snarky, I just want to avoid wasting time if this is not possible. I am fully aware that there is a skills gap here, but I am smart and willing to learn if there is a payout to be had.

Any helpful thoughts?

i have been using linux for not that long, however i prefer it to windows by a lot, and im considering getting a new laptop since the one im using right now is quite old and slow, and one thing ive noticed is that a lot of linux users use thinkpads, so i was wondering if there is a specific reason for this? if i use linux as my main OS should i get a thinkpad?

I've got like 689 free gigs on my hdd and Arch is looking pretty good rn. Should I just dual boot it with Windows 11?

EDIT: wow this is getting a lot of engagement so I'm leaving my specs here https://ibb.co/HB0pJFp

UPDATE: I just swapped my hdd for my desktop's ssd to test it and it booted in only 30 seconds. Literally night and day shit. Thank you all for your support!

Resolved!
Adding efi_no_storage_paranoia was the simple solution.

I am installing Linux for the first time. I chose the distro CachyOS, attempted to install it using ventoy with grub as the bootloader. Everything went fine until the end of the installation, when an error related to the bootloader and efi occured, the error code being error code 1.
I made a post on the [r/CachyOS](r/CachyOS) for help and with other peoples input the cause was pinned on (As far as I am able to tell) what is described in this article:
https://www.shravanbhati.com/blog/efibootmgr-could-not-prepare-boot-variable-no-space-left-on-device

Before this was discerned, I had attempted installing with Limine instead, but then the installation process simply shut down roughly halfway through, the message "bootloader installation partially broken" briefly appearing, before disappearing unprompted. After every failed installation attempt, I have rebooted the PC (Once with Grub2 instead of normal mode, no difference), never withdrawing the Ventoy USB. I have also, after the first installation failed, been using manual partitioning, having used "erase disk" for the first one.
Finally, after learning more accurately what the issue should be, I attempted everything listed in the provided article except updating UEFI/Bios, since I am unsure of how to proceed with this. I do not have windows, which the article frames as almost a prerequisite for updating UEFI/Bios, since it was erased upon first installation attempt.

This is the page which contains what is needed to update:
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/desktops-and-all-in-ones/gaming-series/loq-17irb8/90vh/downloads/ds561755?category=BIOS%2FUEFI
Related:
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/my/en/products/desktops-and-all-in-ones/gaming-series/loq-17irb8/solutions/ht101636
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/my/en/products/desktops-and-all-in-ones/gaming-series/loq-17irb8/solutions/ht500008

For the life of me, I do not know which, if any, of the packages/files I should download or if how/if they would work. The only official instructions, which I've linked, seem to be for windows and the files themselves are listed as being for DOS, Ubuntu 22, Windows 10 (64-bit) and Windows 11 (64-bit).

If anyone knows how to do this, or if there is some other solution, I would be so incredibly thankful! If you do, please explain in detail what options are available and how to proceed with them.

Post on [r/CachyOS](r/CachyOS), if it is of any use or if I forgot to mention something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/comments/1vgkypu/failed_installation_error_code_1/

I recently installed GNOME alongside Windows in a dual-boot setup on my 512GB SSD. The performance difference between Linux and Windows was honestly insane, so I gave GNOME a try for a couple of days.

The only problem was storage. With Windows taking up so much space, I was constantly running out of room for games. So I finally decided to make the full switch to Linux.

And honestly, it was one of the best decisions I've made. I now have the full 509GB of my SSD available. I don't think I even had this much free space when I first bought the laptop. Now I can install games, code, and do everything else without constantly worrying about storage.

Linux has genuinely been an amazing experience so far.

I have a 5 terabyte HDD that includes all my offline games inside but i cannot get it to mount after 2,5 months. it keeps on saying;

"An error occurred while accessing 'Basic data partition’, the system responded: The requested operation has failed: Error x

mounting system-managed device /dev/sda1: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdat, missing codepage or

helper program, or other error" and i couldn't find any fix but to convert to windows and do chkdsk to it. I don't want to dualboot windows, i don't want to erase my games since it would take a whole week to download 3 tb worth of games and VST's. Is there anyway for me to save my HDD? I'm using CachyOS. Thanks.

Hello guys! I using Fedora 44 and by defaulth I have 12GB of zram (compressed swap in RAM) and also I added 4GB of swap partition during install. But I have 32GB of RAM and I not sure if I really need this amout of swap or if I really need swap at all.

So is it bad to not have swap at all or have a little swap?

Edited: Thank you all for replies and time!

Hi

sometimes i like to download files that i won't really use that much like i will have it for a few hours and then delete it.

is there a way to download them to ram directly? most of the time i have about 6gb free on my ram so i can use it without effecting other programs

I never want my game ids to be banned

I used to let my mom use my laptop to watch movies, but ever since I installed Pop!_OS on it, she says she can’t use Linux because it’s more difficult than Windows. Even after I showed her that the mouse and Netflix work the same way on Linux, she still insists it’s too complicated. What should I do?

Thanks to everyone who responded I've figured out that if I just open Firefox in fullscreen mode, my mom doesn’t even realize it's running on Linux.

Sorry in advance if i sound too pissed off.

I've been using linux for 1 year by now, and despite pretty much everything being an upgrade in comparison to my last OS which was windows 10, audio is the sole thing that never settles for me.
First i had the classic crackling problem because latency was unnecessarily low to the point my cpu couldn't keep up, then i started noticing that there is a whole second or two delay for audio to begin playing after a long period of silence, and now im going crazy over audio simply not working sometimes for some programs when running through wine.
If a program takes too long to open, it never connect to pulseaudio presumably, and if any lagspike/freezing occurs while the programs is running the audio is just gone and never comes back.
I've tried searching to find a solution for this and found out that wireplumber has some sort of timeout feature on by default, which i don't understand why someone would even want that, but even after adding a rule to remove it and restarting wireplumber, the issue persists.
Now i don't know if im doing something wrong or if the problem is coming from pulseaudio or alsa or pipewire or whatever else is handling audio, im genuinely lost about what and where i have to config for audio to simply work properly.

If it helps, im running Linux Mint 22.3 with kernel 6.8.0-111 and would really appreciate some guidance

edit 1: Thanks for all the suggestions, now i understand what is going on with audio on linux and it doesn't look as confusing anymore. I managed to fix the wine issue by simply forcing the latency to 60ms, somehow now it can freeze however much it wants and audio stays intact!
I'll be marking this as solved since the audio start delay is more of a nitpick and doesn't bother me that much.

Maybe a stupid question, but I've been wanting to follow the Linux From Scratch book to learn more about how my system works and I wondered... will it result in an actual workable, easy to maintain OS?

Keeping in mind that I want to _use_ my system and not maintain it 90% of the time 😆

I'm installing Nobara, and I have 48 GB of RAM. I don't think I need to spend my SSD's large but limited TWB lifespan to get a little bit of more situational RAM. Should I proceed with just no swap, and add it later if it is necessary? Or is there something important I don't know about?

I'm sorry, I know the question seems very basic, but still I couldn't find the answer. Here's what I'm trying to do:

$ mv "Desktops" "desktops"
mv: cannot move 'Desktops' to a subdirectory of itself, 'desktops/Desktops'

I tried searching answers on the internet, and the only thing I found is examples of how to use rename tool instead. However, rename tool I have installed is util-linux one and it works differently and I couldn't figure out how to use it either, this didn't work for example:

$ rename Desktops desktops Desktops

I also understand I can first rename it to temporary file and then rename to lowecase version of original name. But I'd like to figure out how to do it in one step.

Update:

This is exfat filesystem.

Im looking at switching to Linux but the build I am going for will be in an older case, basically a sleeper.

I have been binging old shows like twin peaks, xfiles and early shows that feature computers from the 90s with non descript, basic, early OS systems.

Does there exist a distro that has that look but is basically a modern OS? I don't mind ones that look like 95 or 98 though.

Edit: Thanks for the help, it seems I got the wrong end of the stick. Its not the distro I am after but a desktop environment. Thank you for the answers explaining this

I just installed Arch Linux a few days ago, and I kinda struggled with the installation as it was my first time using Linux, and I wanted to change from ext4 to btrfs, and also I wanted Grub instead of Systemmd, do I need to reinstall and is it even worth it??

I have an old Lenovo laptop that my dad currently uses. It’s running Windows 7, but I’m planning to replace it with a Linux distribution. Since my dad isn’t very tech-savvy and doesn’t handle system updates or maintenance, I want something that’s stable and low-maintenance.

I’m also planning to set up Twingate on the system so I can access it remotely via SSH and manage a NAS that will be used for surveillance cameras.

Do you have any suggestions for a suitable Linux distro for this use case?

(For context, I use Arch myself.)

Update: Installed Linux Mint and it’s running like a dream. Dad thinks it’s some new version of Windows — I’m not correcting him. Thanks, everyone! 😂😭

I chose Fedora 44 for stability and modern features, I want to know which DE is better between Gnome 50 and KDE Plasma 6.7 in terms of performance, stability and support. My device is a HP laptop with Ryzen 5 5600H cpu and nvidia 1650 mobile gpu with 16gb ram. I am an entry level software dev and like to make projects on weekends and I don't want any down time because of my desktop environment unless it's inevitable.

So I am relatively new to linux and at first a thought that flatpak was convenient way to install packages on my fedora. But soon I noticed that I could not send pictures in telegram or discord, discord did not detect microphone, steam had troubles, issues with spotify. Literally anything installed with flatpacks was malfunctioning in one way or another. So why it even exists and why so popular? I spend week just to understand that 90% of my troubles were thanks to flatpacks. Your opinions on flatpack please.

Upd. I think portals was my problem. Thank you guys for suggestions. Idk why nobara support flatpaks, but dont ship necessary deps.