Can I go an hour without eating pickles? If I fail, I’m deleting my comment. [EDIT: It was a close one, but I made it ! This comment is here to stay ! Celebratory pickle time.]

How about systemd-windows?

I would not recommend Arch for beginners. I like it, but it’s best for someone a bit familiar with Linux already. Yeah, the install is pretty simple now that Archinstall is a thing, but it’s not the method recommended in the Arch Wiki and if there’s something wrong with your install and you complain on the Arch Forum they might not be super helpful.

More generally, the mood on the Arch forum and Arch communities at large isn’t super beginner friendly, and thay’s understandable: In a distro meant to be user friendly and aimed at general user, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system break, the community will feel a responsibility towards them, because the system wasn’t stable and user-friendly enough. In a distro primarily aimed at power users and devs, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system breaks, then the user is a fool and should’ve read the wiki.

Because it is a very fast rolling release, some updates can break stuff. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen at a bad time and be a big problem for someone who doesn’t know how to deal with it.

Debian is more stable, and easier if you go with a D.E, but you still have to make several choices during the install, which might be a bit complicated for a beginner who doesn’t know what any of these options mean… Tho of course, it’s possible to go with all the defaults and it’ll be alright.

But my prime recommendation would be Linux Mint.

I’d switched from i3 to sway, but the click offset in Krita made me switch back.

So there’s the time I converted my partition table from MBR to GPT and it corrupted everything on it so I had to reinstall. Took this opportunity to switch from Mint to Arch, something I’d been thinking of doing for a while.

Once on Arch, I had much more opportunities to make epic mistakes: For example not putting enough room on my root partition (home was on a separate one), so after a while I had to reinstall.

I still haven’t found the solution, have you had any luck with yours?

I tried switching every UEFI setting that seemed to have something to do with booting or gpus, reinstalled gpu bios, upgrading mobo bios, getting a monitor I could plug without a switch… All to no avail.

Well, I think before upgrading the BIOS, one thing had a slightly different result: Setting the boot mode to UEFI and disabling CSM made it display “no gop (graphic output protocol)” after a few minutes, and it offered to either take me to the uefi settings or loading defaults (which implied going back to CSM), after which it boot this time go back to doing the same thing.

I don’t think I’ve had this error since the mobo bios upgrade, but still no display unless I reboot, unless the computer had been turned in until recently. I’m kinda out of ideas…

Strange, because I installed Debian on a laptop just about a month ago, and the ethernet worked, but not the wifi. I had to follow the advice from this thread to get it working. So either this specific driver is too rare for Debian to have bothered putting it in their default non-free repo, or I somehow downloaded an outdated iso by mistake…

I wouldn’t recommend Debian to a noob if they’re installing themselves and have no-one to help, because depending ln their hardware, wifi might not work out of the box, and maybe even not ethernet either. Of course it can all be worked out, but I don’t think having to solve that would make a good first Linux experience. If it’s the iso version with the proprietary firmware already in it’s maybe…

Bodhi Linux (when trying out on a 32 bit laptop) -> Xubuntu (main laptop) -> Linux mint (the distro I’ve used for the longest time, both on main laptop and a desktop got along the way). On the side, I briefly tried Arch first on a wm (as well as Haiku and TempleOS), and later, debian on that 32 bit laptop for earlier. That’s when I first went for a minimal install with i3. Later switched to Arch with i3 on tower, and just yesterday, Debian, also with i3 on main laptop.

My reasoning behind using these two different distros for essentially the same type of setup is that my laptop is more likely to be the only computer I have at my disposal when I urgently need it, so stability is more important, I can’t run the risk of having an update break it. I can be bolder and test more stuff on my desktop knowing I have a backup if mess up. Arch on my desktop is also partly because I use it to play games on Steam, and since SteamOS is based on Arch, I figured it’d have better integration.

Guilty as charged! Thank you, I already did the reinstall. Funny thing is, I followed a shady tutorial for the conversion to gpt. One so suspicious that I probably should 've seen trouble coming- and I did to some extent, enough to make me backup important file before but not enough to fully dissuade me since I hadn’t found anything else nearly as simple. Here is the sustorial . Why so sus ? It’s made by a company that sells a recovery software, which they promote at the end of the article “in case things go wrong”. Such blatant crooks, I feel so dumb for falling for it ! I’ve learnt my lesson now. No more corpo website, only arch wiki and well moderated user communities and forums.

I tried that. But yeah, seems like the partition was damaged. The tools I used were gdisk to convert my partition table from mbr to gpt and parted to make this partition in particular. But I think I did the first part wrong. Regardless, at this point I just assumed the whole thing was corrupted and I did a clean reinstall. Thank you for answering tho!

Thank you again. I got this when I try to run it.

I tried once with only the esp partition and once with the who’e device, but same result. It’s also the same without the -r option. I tried using e2fsk as suggested by the output, but it also doesn’t work (without option or with -b it just displays the help page, with the -c option and either number it says “no such file or directory” and it won’t accept a non-numeric argument).

If at this point you are tired of helping me, I completely understand; and I still have the option of reinstalling (the home is on its own partition and I’ve got a backup anyway, so I wouldn’t lose too much). Regardless, I am grateful for the help you’ve provided so far!

Thank you ! However, now I’m getting a “bogus number of reserved sectors” error. A problem with the partition I made I guess…

Aw, too bad :( Good luck to you as well, tho! I’ve bookmarked your comment, so I’ll be back to tell you if I find the solution, however long it takes!

Thank you ! It didn’t seem to work on it’s own, but I also noticed I wasn’t booting in EFI mode, so maybe if I just change my booting partition and combine it with your advice it’ll work…

Using amd GX 6600… Mostly going fine, tho I haven’t tried any big heavy games. One thing tho… Everytime I turn on my computer, no display. I reboot it and then ot works fine, but ot never does the first time. One path I’ll investigate is the monitor: my monitors are both older and use DVI or VGA ports, so I have to use converters. I might try and get my hand on a more recent monitor to see if I still get the same problem. But if I do, I’m not even sure where to ask. I don’t even think it’s a linux problem, because I tried removing my drive with linux living one with windows and the problem remains. I also was using mint when the problem started and switched to Arch (btw) since and it doesn’t change a thing.

Great photo illustration

Soon we’ll be debating whether we call it systemd/linux or gnu/systemd.