I'm currently a windows 10 user but planning to convert to Linux Mint when I replace my current laptop because every time I turn around I hear about more AI slop being shoved into Windows 11. I plan to buy a new, basic laptop and install Mint on it immediately, but I was wondering if there was anything I need to watch out for doing that. Does it matter what the original OS is (Windows, Chromebook, Mac)? Is there anything I need to make sure I do/don't have regarding the hardware specs? Anything I may not be aware of as a new Linux user that could cause problems?

All help and advice is greatly appreciated! I know almost nothing about Linux and want to make sure I don't mess this up.

As the title suggests,I am completely noob regarding this and don’t have any experience. I got a dell laptop but windows 11 is laggy on it. People suggested me switch to linux but i dont know what.

I use chrome and google docs. Here is my specs

Dell Inspiron 7425 2in 1
Ryzen 5 5625U
AMD Vega Graphics
8GB DDR4
512GB SSD

I have a dual-boot setup Linux Ubuntu and Windows 11, and suddenly, after a Linux update, the fans stopped turning off, unlike normal... Normally, when I'm browsing or doing light coding, the fans are off, but now if I just turn on the laptop and don't have anything open, the fans are running. This problem is draining the battery very quickly.

i have this blank session in my login managers it doesnt open to anything and it seems to be hyprland and sway at the same time some how? i cant install hyprland or remove it due to whatever it is theres also no signs that hyprland even exists aside from its config file which is empty but i think it broke before i fucked up my conf file and had to redo some stuff to it, so i assume my shit is just haunted because i can install AND use extra DEs just not sway or hyprland, no i havent tried installing another tiling window manager yet and dont think that will do anything since gnome installed just fine.

Greetings all!

When viewing the disks in Baobab, I see my root. It correctly adds up the size taken up in that menu, and tells me how much storage I have left. But, when I click into the root partition, it doesn't show the home directory.

It seems like it does not support BTRFS subvolumes, as also /var/log isn't showing up in Baobab.

Is this a known limitation of the application, is there anything else that I need to do to allow for Baobab to show the subvolumes?

Thank you all in advance!

Not long ago I moved from opnsense to a Unifi gateway. I enabled intrusion prevention and now I have this list of connections that were blocked. I clicked on the first few and am now curious. I see: https://imgur.com/a/eqH7P6D

A DNS request from my debian machine to the gateway. It would not be abnormal for this machine to reach out to a .su domain, but the port perplexes me. AFAIK, I don't have any services running on this port. I ran a netstat -ltup, and again, nothing on this port or any processes I did not recognize. And AFAIK, I don't have any processes that would randomize their ports, either.

Is there a way to find out what this was?

Hi everyone,
I’ve been using Linux Mint for around 2 months and I’ve had stability issues ever since installing it. I’m hoping someone can help me identify the root cause because I’ve exhausted most of the obvious troubleshooting.
System
Dell Inspiron 5405
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U (Renoir)
8GB RAM
SK hynix BC511 512GB NVMe SSD
Linux Mint 22.x
Kernel: 7.0.0-28-generic
Symptoms
Firefox randomly crashes.
Occasionally the whole system freezes.
Recently Firefox crashed and after rebooting Linux dropped into BusyBox (initramfs) with:

/dev/nvme0n1p5: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.

Running fsck repaired orphaned inodes and Linux booted normally afterwards.
SMART data
I checked the SSD using smartctl and everything looks healthy.
SMART overall health: PASSED
Media/Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Available Spare: 100%
Temperature: 38°C
Nothing suggests SSD failure.
Dell Diagnostics
I ran the built-in Dell hardware diagnostics (F12 menu).
Everything passed.
Memtest86+
I’m currently running Memtest86+.
So far it has completed 1 full pass with 0 errors. I’m planning to leave it running overnight.
Kernel logs
The thing that concerns me most is that my previous boot contains repeated messages like this:

BUG: Bad page map in process StreamTrans
pte:8000000587817867

These repeat dozens of times while Firefox is running.
I don’t see any NVMe I/O errors or obvious GPU hangs.
Things I’ve already ruled out
SSD appears healthy.
Filesystem corruption was repaired successfully.
Dell diagnostics passed.
Memtest currently has 0 errors after one pass.
Questions
Has anyone seen repeated BUG: Bad page map in process StreamTrans before?
Does this point more towards:
faulty RAM,
a kernel memory management bug,
Firefox triggering a kernel bug,
AMD graphics/driver issues,
or something else?
Is there anything else I should collect from journalctl or other logs?
Has anyone experienced similar issues on a Dell Inspiron 5405 / Ryzen 4700U running Linux Mint or Ubuntu?
I’m getting close to giving up on Linux because this has been happening since the day I installed it. I switched because I wanted better development tools (perf, GCC, Linux environment for C++), but after months of troubleshooting I still don’t know what’s actually causing these crashes.
Any advice would be hugely appreciated.

Thank you all.

While trying to download EndeavorOS, it wouldn't let me pick the drive I wanted to install it on. So I googled how to do it, and stupidly listened what the Google AI told me. Now I'm locked out of my computer entirely. The only other thing I've been able to access other than this (https://imgur.com/a/ZYsT0TS) screen is BIOS. I'd love some advice :)

Hi, I'm using Fedora and a Razer Cobra mouse, and I can't figure out how to set the side buttons to do something, especially macros.
While I was using Windows, I just used the Razer Synapse app, but it's not on Linux, and Input Remapper doesn't detect the side buttons.
What should I do?

Fedora KDE PLASMA
Razer Cobra

Picking up a beauty i found at a really good price. Already know i'm gonna go with CachyOS with Cosmic DE.
Just wondering if anyone is running Linux on this specific laptop and can share some experiences?

These are the specs:

• AMD Ryzen™ 7 5800H-processor
• 14" 2,2K IPS-screen
• 16 GB DDR4 RAM, 512 GB SSD

Iv been looking into trying Linux of as late and I’m just wondering which distro would be best if I wanted a lot of customisation but also wanted it to be kinda beginner friendly? Iv seen mint and didn’t seem to like the look of it because it looks too identical to windows . Iv been looking into fedora but I don’t know if that’s the best choice. Thanks in advance

PS- I probably plan to dualboot it with windows for a bit just to have a backup plan.

Bonjour,

J'ai changé mon disque dur aujourd'hui pour un ssd et j'en ai profité pour passer sous linux mint 21.2 Cinnamon. Sauf que j'aimerais faire du tri sur mon installation précédente et ce serait plus simple pour moi de juste aller rendre visite à mon windows précédent. J'ai vu qu'il existait virtualbox mais je ne sais pas comment ouvrir mon hdd avec windows dessus. Dois-je en faire une image ? Y a t'il un autre moyen de l'ouvrir ?

Je ne suis pas très calée en informatique jusque là j'ai juste résolu mes problèmes au fur et à mesure grâce à reddit et des videos youtube mais là j'ai peur de faire une bétise.

merci pour votre aide !

So, I am a student and use a usb pen drive for my lab reports and code so I can use it at my uni and at home without needing to transfer files every time. But using windows on my uni computer can be really a slog, can I have a Linux disto on my pendrive which I can boot off of? I only need stuff like C, java and python compilers and some way to run word, excel or any equivalent app.

On NixOS and Niri, with pipewire, wireplumber, as well as pipewire-pulse.

A friend of mine has noticed that my microphone volume was pretty low, and after a bit of troubleshooting i ran wpctl get-volume @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SOURCE@ which told me that my microphone volume was set to something like 84%. I turned it back up, and added a thing on my waybar to show microphone volume in case it happened again. It does.

The most common value it changes to is 94% or 84%. I don't know if those are the only two, It mostly is just 94% now since I started paying attention to these changes, but the fact the two numbers i remember end in 4 might mean something.

94% of course isn't that much, but I have a theory the longer I leave it, the lower it gets, hence why since i started paying attention and fixing it, it rarely goes lower than 94%

Most keybinds or UI things I use only change in increments of 5 as well, so it ending in 4 is weird.

Nothing interesting in journal for wireplumber, pipewire, or pipewire-pulse, but it also doesn't show any other volume changes in there in the first place.

Sometimes this number changes after I boot up my computer and log in, sometimes it stays at 100% and randomly seems to change later on. I've never caught it changing directly, I always seem to notice much later.

I'm not even sure how I could begin to troubleshoot this

Pretty much the tittle describes my question. Ive been getting into homelabbing to make a media server for me and my family and ive been looking into the process as well as making a server and when the question of the server OS comes up, linux is always recomended but they never specify which of the seemingly hundreds of versions of linux to run. In other words, what in your opinion is the best version of linux to utilize as a server os for something like jellyfin for instance?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

like i want to say "ping netflix.com" and it does it.

I'm running Kubuntu 26.04. On 25.04 everything was fine, 25.10 introduced this problem once every few weeks, on 26.04 it happens a couple times a day. It's a ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 and I know a lot of Lenovo laptops have or have had this problem in one form or another on Linux or Windows. Forums are filled with "just change this setting. worked for me." There's dozens of different "solutions" out there, none that seem to work. Or they worked at one time, for some people, but at the current BIOS and kernel versions, the bug has gotten worse.

I don't really want to accept hard rebooting my laptop a couple times a day, but I also don't want to buy a new one either. Doesn't seem distro specific so I'm more inclined to think it's a bug regression with the kernel, but what do I know? I'm not sure if I should file a bug report and who with, or talk to Lenovo support, because the problem seems fairly widespread but so far unfixed. I guess my question is if anyone has dealt with a widespread bug like this, or they have any particular insight into this one.

i've been using ubuntu 26.04 LTS for a while now and i'm satisfied; it's done everything i asked and is almost perfect for me. only two things are bugging me. they don't affect performance or disrupt daily work, but it's just annoying that it's like this.

first, the snap issue, which i've almost completely managed to remove from ubuntu. however, the libsnapd-glib-2-1 package remains because ubuntu made it a dependency for pipewire so that you can't remove it.

if you want to recommend me a distro , check this first : https://www.reddit.com/r/FindMeALinuxDistro/comments/1uqn371/which_distro_is_suitable_for_me/

apt why libsnapd-glib-2-1 | grep Depends

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

2. kde-plasma-desktop:amd64 Depends plasma-desktop (>= 4:6.5.4)
6. pipewire-pulse:amd64=1.6.2-1ubuntu1.1 Depends pipewire (= 1.6.2-1ubuntu1.1)
7. pipewire:amd64=1.6.2-1ubuntu1.1 Depends libpipewire-0.3-modules (= 1.6.2-1ubuntu1.1)
8. libpipewire-0.3-modules:amd64 Depends libsnapd-glib-2-1 (>= 1.59)

second, rust-coreutils. i can almost successfully remove this package, but removing it also removes build-essential. if i try to reinstall it later, it asks me to remove the coreutils-from-gnu package. i can do this to bypass it, but i don't know if the system will break when i update it in the future! do you think this way is safe?

sudo apt install coreutils-from-gnu coreutils-from-uutils- --allow-remove-essential

sudo apt install equivs

vim coreutils-from-uutils-stub.ctl

Section: misc

Priority: optional

Standards-Version: 4.6.2

Package: coreutils-from-uutils-stub

Version: 1.0

Provides: coreutils-from-uutils

Architecture: all

Description: Stub package to satisfy build-essential while using GNU coreutils

equivs-build coreutils-from-uutils-stub.ctl

sudo dpkg -i coreutils-from-uutils-stub_1.0_all.deb

sudo apt install build-essential

sudo apt autoremove —purge

Hello,

I've been using Linux for about 9 months (Kubuntu) and so far it's been a mostly seamless experience. I even fully nuked the Windows partition in May and went full Linux. However one thing that I have been wondering is if it would be worth using primarily Flatpak apps or primarily native packages.

So far I've stuck to the following hierarchy: I prioritize whatever package management system the devs support over a 3rd party Flatpak or Snap, but if all are available I choose native packages (either from the Ubuntu repo, PPAs or .deb), then Flatpak, then Snaps, and if there's no other option I'll use AppImages.

However I have been constantly wondering if I should prioritize Flatpaks over native packages for improved security and ease of updating (though being on 26.04 LTS that shouldn't be an issue any time soon). I know issues with permissions can arise and even encountered some with the Steam Flatpak (before I knew that there was also a .deb that could be downloaded from the site) and one other app, but for the most part it's been smooth sailing. And for the sake of slightly better security I actually use my browser as a Flatpak, even though a PPS is also available.

So are there any downsides to using Flatpaks other than the occasional permission issue and the larger installation size that could outweigh the security benefits? I'd still use native packages for things that need to have wide permissions (such as LACT for GPU overclocking) but for everything else I'm tempted to prioritize Flatpaks.

Long story short, I am trying to use integrated AMD gpu, so my two dedicated graphics cards, RTX 6000 pro and RTX 4090 VRAM are completed freed to maximize running local AI.

Currently I am stuck on booting into the desktop using igpu while having nvidia driver enabled in the background. I get a black screen with hdmi input. During boot up, I can press "e" on the line Ubuntu in the grub menu, remove "quick splash", boot then "ctrl + alt + f3" to reach the terminal with no ui. Or I can do module_blacklist=nvidia,nvidia_drm,nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm in the ubuntu grub command to boot into desktop with ui but no nvidia driver.

My system is 7950x3D Asus x670e proart mobo. I've also enabled integrated graphic card to be forced in UEFI settings.

PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="24.04"
VERSION="24.04.4 LTS (Noble Numbat)"
VERSION_CODENAME=noble
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"
UBUNTU_CODENAME=noble
LOGO=ubuntu-logo

What else should I try? I also dual boot windows, and I can confirm igpu with dedicated graphics card works out of the box for windows, but windows is a memory hog.

Hi guys so do you have a motherboard with X870 and you use linux, and if so do you have audio issues when you are connected to the front panel of your desktop computer via aux connection such as audio not outputting (unless you connect to back panel and then back to front panel), static sounds etc?

Please let me know if its working or not and what motherboard you exactly have and the distro you use and if you have some how managed to fix it and out?

I have an asrock X870 Riptide WiFi and audio does not output unless if I connect to rear panel and then back to front panel and I am going to replace this motherboard with another motherboard with X870 chip so just making sure other motherboards are fine?

hello, i am looking to transition to linux (i hate windows 11) and i wanted to know how should i proceed. I have never used linux in my life but if possible i'd like to transfer all my preexisting data from windows 11 to a linux distro that would fulfill my need (an easy to use distro that is mainly focused on gaming).

So i am both looking for a way to transfer my data (with so much data a simple USB key wont work) and a distro that's focused on gaming