Table of Contents

Linux Notes

Random notes about Linux discovering along the way.

Favorite as of Oct 2024 ZorinOS

I was using zorin on old computers as more of a necessity but now I'm finding I like it quite a lot even on my main or secondary computer. Probably going to buy the license for Pro, just to support the application. It's really great what they've got going on. Seems to be a best of for a lot of things. We'll see what the future holds. For older computers, I might look at an OS with even less resources, only problem is support for various things like wireless.

Favorite Apps to Install on Linux

Brave, vlc, Blender, Inkscape, GIMP, VSCodium, Krita, Kdenlive, DaVinci, Kodi, Lunacy (UX), Penpot Desktop (UX), Steam, kSnip, Marble, Minetest, Signal, NextCloud, Immich, Zorin Sync, freeplane, keepassx, minder, tor, RSS Guard, Mousai song id, xnview, OBS, MKVToolNix,

Other Interesting Apps

Surge Engine (2D game dev), Mindustry, TeeWorld (multiplayer shooter?), leocad, kolibri, scratch, scrivano, space launch, sumo traffic sim, tropy research app, appflowy, anytype, callibre, calligraphy ascii, chronos timer, gnucash, gnumeric, gromit screen notations, halftone, invoice ninja, joplin, keyboardcast, librewolf, master pdf editor, monero gui, moosync, opendeck, pdfsam, pi imager, qr scanner, redshift, tactics (soccer lineup), webkit font generator, xmind?, curttail imag compressor, khronos time track, DOSBox, Warble word guess, AmiBerry, Zelda3, BforArtists, Bitwig studio, DrawIO, flacon audio extractor, fontforge, freeCAD freetube, Letterpress ASCII, LMMS, jellyfin, Lollypop music org, MakeMKV, MediaDownloader, MoonPlayerDownloader,MPV Player, MUSE DAW, MUSEScore, OCR Feeder, OpenToonz, shotwell, darktable, rawtherapee, StegoSuite, StopMotion, UpScayl, Tube2Go, WireFrameSketcher, Alpaca Local AI Chat, Whaler for Docker,

Pitfalls

Be careful updating the linux kernal for things when the confirmation screen comes up. Find out what order to update the OS vs the kernel. If the two are incompatible, you won't have a desktop environment to make any of the fixes. This happened to me with Manjaro updates in the past year. Funny also happened to Linux Tech Tips.

Drive Image Information

Part of getting any OS onto a computer, is getting an image. It's important to be aware of the software used to work with images.

Linux Laptops

Niche Distros / Lesser Known

Privacy Focused

Lightweight super low power distros (for OLD laptops)

Gaming Distros

There will be some duplicates here. Dedicated Gaming distributions of Linux just mean things like Steam, nvidia cards will maybe be more compatible. It's expected that some would work on newer more powerful computers and support drivers for newer hardware.

Linux software

I've used some excellent software over the years on linux. Much of this has been talked about everywhere but I need to put my own favorites on here. part of these apps are going to be the answer to a full featured setup for somebody like myself.

Essential app list

Creating USB / SD card Images for Linux and Pi

In order to install Linux on a system using USB, you need to make a working USB image from an ISO. To create the USB image, use the Rufus application. If you need to flash a raspberry pi OS from an downloadable image to SD or USB, use Raspberry Pi imager or Balena Etcher.

SteamDeck

This device is being built by valve and will run the new SteamOS linux software. Millions have preordered this device so there will be a huge incentive to make games for this system to work.

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/

System 76

System 76 created PopOS distro. But they are also working on their own desktop environment called Cosmic. And they created their own open source customizeable keyboard that seems to have an excited following. Before that they had open sourced their case designs too.

https://system76.com/

Gaming Resources

Cool thing about linux is all of the retrogaming

Commercial Software

Here are some interesting commercial software offerings for Linux.

Graphics

Video Editing

UX Design