You and me brother.
Which machine did you choose? I went for the Lelit Bianca, never regretted it.
I'm planning to make a modular synth from scratch, but I need to start with the PSU. Do you see any issues with this schematic?
The main difference between this design and traditional linear PSUs is the replacement of the transformer/rectifier/filter circuit by Mean Well IRM AC/DC converters. The linear regulation circuit is basically the reference design for the 78xx/79xx.
Do you think there would be an issue once scaled? The AC/DC converters have a lot of headroom, as I plan to make up to 3 regulation circuits like so:
(the regulated outputs will actually never go nowhere near 1A per rail)
You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)
The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide.
Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.
If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).
Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It's okay. You're learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.
Arch Wiki without a doubt. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same.
Okay, now to the most important questions
There are a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there, but these can be broadly put into two main categories: general-purpose distros and niche-distros. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a large community of maintainers and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case.
These are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way.
So you've taken your first steps, you're starting to be really comfortable with Linux, and you want to get your hands dirty and really learn what's happening under the surface? These should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed.
This is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences.
You've done your research, you're almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community, but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?
Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE's settings. But sometimes, it's much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it's the only way to fix something. It's not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.
Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server.
No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner. (Thanks @[email protected] for the precisions)
Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people's complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GeForce users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80's and 90's and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. Wayland solves that by being just a simple display protocol with a much smaller codebase, and offloading feature development to the compositors.
No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.
Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent version. Snaps however are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. If you're fine with that, have fun. (Thanks @[email protected] for the precisions)
Yes. One does not speak unless one knows. You can take your helmet off in public tho.
Feel free to help correct, expand, or simplify this guide :)
BallisticNG. Incredible WipEout homage, Linux native, VR compatible, runs locked at 60fps on Deck. Fun tracks, cool ships, nice lore. Physics and mechanics are by default more geared towards classic PSX games (1, 2097, 3), with "modern" physics and mechanics (Pure/Pulse/HD with absorb, barrel roll etc.) getting an overhaul in the next version.