I've been using Arch for almost half a year, so far the only thing that broke for me was the Linux Zen kernel as it had some issues regarding the NVIDIA 340xx modules, a few days later it got fixed.

Right now i am thinking about moving to Solus, but the only thing that stops me from doing it is the fact that Solus doesn't have AUR or something similar to it.

I recommend that you also try Gentoo, even in VM to widen the experience. If you have time of course. Nothing is wrong with Arch, if you synergise with its update pace.


Meanwhile, look how magnificent Windows is! And this is why...

Just learned about that, now i am waiting for a good moment to get AMD related stuff, because fuck NVIDIA and Intel.

Forgive my ignorance, but aside from releasing many CPU's (sometimes with very little difference) and often crazy prices, what else is wrong with Intel? I say this because I own quite a number of CPU's and never had issues with them, they are also a good contributor to open-source projects and despite everything, they perform very well. Last but not least let's not forget they also offer one of the best price per performance CPU, the G4560.


As for Nvidia it's understandable, they make good drivers and the cards' performance is great but:

a) Windows drivers are bulky full of useless junk.
b) As a company they are very open-source unfriendly.
c) Adding telemetry without user's consent, to me that's a breach of privacy.

Intel contributes to open-source only to please its partners - big business segment.

UEFI, secure boot, IPMI are all done by intel using Linux, yet they don't really integrate well with Linux host OS and the source is not easily available(if at all).

However, its correct that they invested big time to Wayland and Mesa.

Amd on the contrary does it also for community. They fired Ati managers and hired engineers to convert Fglrx from proprietary pile into opensource driver for consumer cards and half-open/half-closed for business cards. The largest letdown with Amd is being Ryzen implementing software-based TPM (fTPM, firmwareTPM) and thus they stopped to provide AGESA source, so that coreboot support is no more.

Trying a support question of sorts here, as I'm thinking about upgrading from Mint 17.1 to 18.2

Currently I still technically have a Windows partition of 50GB. Not sure if it even works any more if I tried to boot it up, but it doesn't matter as I haven't used it in years. I would like to remove it, and merge it with /home, or alternatively / (root). Is this possible to do in a safe way? Should I backup all the stuff on /home first? (it's rather large, 150GB, most of it filled).

Since it's recommended to do a fresh install when moving between 17.x to 18.x, is there anything else I should do beforehand, any settings or files or anything I would need to backup? Will the /home folder work as it does now if I re-install, or will there be missing 'parts' for some reason, so a new /home is created or something?

For instance, I have some games installed through PlayOnLinux. Will all that be wiped?

Haven't done this before, so not sure I should venture into the unknown, but perhaps it's about time to upgrade too. Been a while since 17.1 was out.

Attaching a picture from GParted. Not sure if /swap is needed tbh, but I used a small one when installing the system some years ago.

While a backup is *never* a bad idea, you should be able to do what you want with GParted from a live system without losing any data.

That didn't answer a lot, but I found a program called Back in Time (latest version), and am currently backing up the /home folder. Even if something goes awry, that should hopefully keep my more important data safe. Looks like a very useful program btw, also for more regular updates.

I'd recommend making a backup of /home and then just wiping & repartitioning the whole lot to tidy things up while installing 18.2. Unless you deliberately put anything elsewhere all of your user settings & data should be in your home directory, so just making a backup of /home should be enough.

You could repartition & keep your existing home directory and that should work as long as you use the same username (or rename the old home directory to match the new username), but with such a large leap between versions it'll probably be best to just backup the home directory & be picky about what you decide to restore.

I always reinstall games with PlayOnLinux to re-test with newer versions of Wine, but I don't see why it would a problem though as long as ~/.PlayOnLinux is backed up & restored (also watch out for any relevant save directories under ~/Documents).

I find that reinstalling Mint isn't anywhere near as much of a hassle as reinstalling Windows (and do so every time I upgrade to a newer version)... nothing to worry about as long as you keep backups of everything important :)

It's fine to go without any swap space as long as your system has plenty of RAM - I stopped using any swap space when I built my last system and have never had any problems as a result, but I had 8GB of RAM back then & 16GB now (with plans to upgrade to 32GB when memory prices come down). You could go without to see how things go & create a swap file later if you do run into memory issues.

Thank you for the advice. I have now done a fresh upgrade of Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon, and everything went splendidly. Almost quicker to install Mint than to start up a Windows machine =)

Have restored everything I had in /home with Back-in-Time. That took a good while (130 gigs or so). Good thing I backed it up too, because the partition restructure didn't want to play nice when I tried to expand the size of home after removing the Windows partitions -- probably because they weren't right next to each other, so the free space was in the 'wrong' spot. So I removed the whole lot and re-created them. Initially removed /swap, but I got some dire warning, so put in a 1GB swap partition again. It probably doesn't do anything, but it's small so no big loss. I have 8GB RAM. Too expensive when I bought new hardware a couple years ago.

Looks like I will have to reinstall several of the games, despite shortcuts and such on the desktop and data in /home, but at least some of them work right off the bat, like Pillars of Eternity.

18.2 looks good so far, and I hope it is as stable and the 17.1 version was.

What are your recommendations about updates? I see some level 4 security updates are auto-marked, but previously I didn't install level 4 or 5, didn't have them visible. Is it safe, or is there a great risk of instability? It's a linux-firmware one, for instance.

Read the whole PDF file you linked to btw, and it was excellent. Very good work! :) Thankfully I was aware of most of it, but it never hurts to read that stuff again, and there were some other bits of advice I didn't know, like the settings on SSD disks to prevent writes.

The installer will always warn if you don't create any swap space, even if you have tons of RAM.

They should all still work, although you will most likely need to install some dependencies for them to work since you've just done a clean OS install.

The exact definitions of the update levels is different in 18.2 than it was for previous versions which is why the defaults are slightly different now. It should be safe to install all level 1-4 updates though - the Mint team recommends installing the level 4 updates one at a time, but they're a bit pessimistic about the risk.

Thanks. Then it should be safe to install level 4 this time around.

However, I may have messed up a bit now. Bugger. Was fidgeting around to install playonlinux and wine. Wanted the most recent playonlinux since the one in the repository is almost 2 years old. Then went to install wine. Same deal there. So I looked for a PPA or something, and came upon winehq. But it now looks like they have their own version or something, and I'm not sure how I can uninstall it (if needed?) and all the dependencies. There were loads of those, around 90 I think.
https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

Looks like apt-get remove or purge only removes the actual package mentioned, not all the dependencies.

Help? :(

Installing Wine via WineHQ's repository shouldn't be anything to worry about & should be little different to installing the normal version provided by Ubuntu, except that WineHQ's will be much newer. PlayOnLinux uses its own separate versions of Wine as well as whatever's installed system-wide so it won't really affect that (well, anything that uses the system's version of Wine will be using the newer WineHQ-provided version instead, but you can just change it to a version provided by POL if necessary).

Anyway, whether it's the version provided by Ubuntu or one of the WineHQ versions you'll want to install the Wine package to get all of the dependencies, as they're needed by POL's versions of Wine too.

As for PlayOnLinux itself, I just use the .deb package from their site to install it: https://www.playonlinux.com/en/download.html

I plan to release a wrapper for Civ4 at some point (it's actually more or less done already), will need the GOG version though. I'll likely be using a newer version of Wine Staging though because I ran into some problems with the usual version of Wine.

The Witcher 2 would only have been installed as root if you'd deliberately done so. Even if it was installed somewhere odd though, its saves should be in your home directory, under ~/.local/share/cdprojektred/witcher2