So it begins.
I’ve been flashing my USB often enough that it’s now worth it to keep all my ISO’s neatly to use them when I need them. I plan on buying 10 USB sticks to just have ready when ever I need a specific version.
I’m visiting family now, so time to upgrade their Linux Mint to Kubuntu
- you need Ventoy to stop formatting you’re USB sticks
- Keeping lot of ISO is a bit useless just the few that you use daily.
- If you’re keeping this ISO anyway, get them by torrent and keep sharing for helping the community
Another important point 4. Always check checksums (sha256 etc)
Is there a simple guide to checking checksums? It doesn’t seem like it should be complex but half the time the distro’s instructions don’t work for me!
First you need to download the provided file from the distro page. Something with Checksum in the name most of the time. The website should provide instructions. Please note that does not validate the gpg key.
Quick Method Terminal: Open the terminal at the location of the ISO file or go there with
cd. Typesha256sum NameOfIsoFile.iso- it takes a moment depending on your system. Copy the output (some long numbers/letters). Compare it with the downloaded checksum-file - open the file, press ctrl-f or whatever you have for find and paste it. If it’s found, it’s the same.Method KDE: Right click the file, open properties, then go to tab “Checksums”. Paste same number/letter combination from above into the provided space “Expected checksums…” - if it’s green, it’s correct.
Thanks, that does sound familiar. Maybe it was the gpg bit that confused me before.
While checking checksums is important, it you’re getting them from the same place as the download you might as well ignore the checksum. If someone can replace the download they can very likely also replace the checksum file download.
Just use the appropriate command for the hash type, i.e.
sha256sum <filename>(iirc, might be wrong,manis your friend)
Ventoy is great, it’s my go to tool, boots on basically everything (even my MacBook) but… wasn’t there a scare about possibly being compromised because it builds itself from hundreds of modules on github or something like that?
Afaik the maintainer(s) have provided a reasonable explanation and cleared up the reproducible builds part
Oh that’s good to know. Thanks!
Also if you have a fast internet connection, check out https://netboot.xyz/
Just buy 2.5 HDD put it in USB sata case and use as USB stick with ventoy
Or if you want to install an entire iso in less than a minute, one of these.
I really like that one. I can move a terabyte in minutes, and unlike some other M.2 enclosures, this one is a heatsink sandwich, which enables sustained full-speed operation.
Buying m2 nowadays or any ssd is not cheap thing at all
True. But if you have an old one laying around, from a laptop, desktop or whatever, even a low end one will saturate usb while beating 2.5" hdds.
It may not work. I have two ssds like that and they both won’t boot ventoy for some reason, but a hdd in a usb case worked no problem.
Also, unless you’re using the usb3 interface it doesn’t make much difference really.
I use this one professionally, yet to come across a PC that wouldn’t boot from it.
And yeah, you won’t benefit unless the PC also has both fast ports and fast storage.
But half of the time I’m using it to move files from a customers old PC to their new one, and more aften than not, even the old one has at least one quick usb C port.
I’d recommend a HDD enclosure with a virtual drive emulator. I personally use this one which I’ve had for about a decade at this point. Lovely device. At some point I think I’ll pop an SSD in it instead, mostly just for durability purposes.
Sure.
But that’s limited to SATA 3 speeds. A “mere” 600 MB/s. Not to mention SATA SSDs often can’t sustain their theoretical maximums.
USB3.2x2 can do 2500 MB/s, and with heatsinks on an NVME drive you can actually reach and sustain that transfer speed.
When you’re moving more than 500 gigs of something, or if you move ISO sized things often, it’s really nice.
When I occasionally have to write an ISO to usb for macOS or when ventoy for some reason wont work, I get annoyed at how I actually have to wait a bit, even though my thumbdrives aren’t slow.
They’re just not NVME with a heatsink fast. I’ve gotten used to moving ISOs around like they’re text files.
10 USB sticks? why? just use ventoy and throw them all on an external SSD or something. that’s what I do. can even use that with specific dotfiles you need for each distro along with ventoy. much easier to deal with than 10 usb sticks.
You can use Ventoy to have many ISOs on one stick ^^
I wish I knew how it worked before! I thought it was a Windows only software and I kept installing isos to my USB one by one every time. Wasted so much time :')
For me seem like Ventoy is fucking with Arch iso and can’t be install from it, now my 64GB USB is only contain an Arch install, probably be I’m doing something stupid idk
I can assure you, you will never need them.
I got a USB stick with ventoy installed, got a gparted and an arch linux iso on that thing, I do use those regularly.
Ah remember when I had this phase
Don’t “upgrade” to Kubuntu. I’m on it and want to upgrade away because Ubuntu. Fedora Kinoite is probably the best bet if you want KDE for a tech novice.
KDE is really annoying though. Kate is a horrible text editor if you’re not a programmer, and Kwrite has weird default shortcuts without any preconfigured “Gnome/Windows style” available. The Dolphin File Explorer doesn’t allow you to sort and group by different things. And Kparted isn’t as easy to use as Gnome Disk Utility. Still, I like how KDE had better themes than Cinnamon and how it actually lets me move programs to different categories in the start menu.
https://media.ccc.de/v/5012-the-first-encrypted-steam-deck-runs-opensuse#t=0
OpenSUSE is better than Fedora
I tried OpenSUSE and I ran into various issues installing software. Plus the immutable variant of OpenSUSE is an external project IIRC.
Yep, suse is cool, the default firewall config is way more restricted (safer but annoying at times). Dbeaver can’t install some essential depends for some reason and shotcut is missing some features (I could try fixing it but for now I just use appimages). It is way more stable than fedora or arch, even if I sometimes forget to upgrade it for months.
Don’t distrohop too much, at one point there won’t be much more to explore with other distros other than wallpapers and themes
There is always more.
Have you tried Chimera Linux?
Won’t work for me, just like anything immutable, because I rely on one DKMS driver for my motherboard PWM sensors. But the project itself is pretty cool
Upgrade Mint to Kubuntu 💀
isn’t it the other way? Ubuntu/Kubuntu -> Mint -> Arch-based (Manjaro, …), Arch … -> “btw”
manjaro -> ubuntu -> most other distros
There are no “outstanding good distros”, there are bad ones to avoid, and ones suited or not suited for your use case
I mostly found it funny they felt the neet to upgrade from mint on a family members computer to anything else, because I can’t imagine mint not already working fine for them.
I fail to see the benefit in “Upgrading” to kubuntu (or anything else) in this case.
But yes u right hehe arch btw but also mby mint btw 🤔
Maybe its to change the de lol
I don’t mean to crash the party, I used to love Ventoy too. But then the blob issue came up and it was met with silence for over a year by the maintainer, that made me a bit uncomfortable. They have responded to it a while ago, but it’s no trivial task to solve as I understand it: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/3224
If you’re wanting to use software that’s most easily available on different distros, why not just use Distrobox? If you are just wanting to change the UI, why not just switch DEs? If you really need to be able to randomly switch away from/to system level differences, what are you doing? What would necessitate that?
This is a phase that most Linux enthusiasts go through at some point. It takes time to understand what a distro really is.
People see distros as being much more different than they really are because of the default settings between distros being so different from each other.
At the end of the day a distro is basically just a way of choosing which group of people you want to trust to package software for you.
Remember to keep Hannah Montana Linux too!
Install Temple OS on your mom’s desktop
Wow, just looked that one up on Wikipedia… just… wow
Are they Linux ISOs or “Linux ISOs”?
Maybe not Kubuntu? It’s not de-Canonical’d like Mint or Pop!_OS, so it’ll have weird bad things like Snap or the not-yet-ready Rust coreutils.
Ventoy for most, but some stuff doesn’t work with correctly when booted from ventoy:
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ChromeOS Flex won’t install to internal drive when ventoy booted, it will when flashed directly to a usb.
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also had Linux Mint 22 try to install to the ventoy drive (wiping it and then crashing halfway through)
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and dealing with really old 32bit bios laptops you’ll have to use direct usb too (AntiX still supports 32bit)
I’ve had issue with proxmox from Ventoy but other than that it’s great.
This has been fixed since some versions of ventoy.
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